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Trump Administration Plans To Freeze Obama-Era Fuel Standards (theverge.com)
The Trump administration plans to freeze Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards starting in 2021, according to a report from The Washington Post. The report says the Trump administration "would go even further by restricting a state's ability to set its own fuel standards, which would be a strike against California and its strict state-specific emissions rules," reports The Verge. From the report: The proposal has been reportedly drafted by the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, and the plan right now is to freeze standards for cars and light trucks at levels set for the year 2021 and keep them their for five years. The Obama administration's rules, which involved a partnership with California and car makers, set standards at 50 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks by 2025. Obama also, through the Clean Air Act, granted California a waiver to set its own, higher standards. That way, if automobile manufacturers wanted to maintain a presence in the lucrative California market, they'd have to abide by the new rules. The Trump administration now says a separate law overrules that arrangement, The Washington Post reports.
Obama tried compromise, didn't seem to work with the obstructionists in Congress. Con-gress, the opposite of pro-gress.
More like a strike against Chevron(*), which controls he reformulation of gasoline in California to prevent importation of gasoline refined in other states, and artificially raise the price.
State specific environmental regulations should be held to he same bar as state specific laws... subject to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution: Federal regulations override state.
(*) From those wonderful folks who brought you MTBE
Good thing is that the lithium, once mined, is recyclable. And most people drive under 50 miles a day. Which means that, with more charging stations coming online, newer electric "commuter" cars could have smaller batteries. Enough for a range of ~100 miles, not 300-400.
Also, dead is dead. How many kids have died in horrible ways in US-funded and often US-lead wars over oil? US still uses napalm. Which really does stick to kids and burn like hell.
This is classic whataboutism.
They're just a bunch of Koch suckers.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
1. Lithium is not a "rare earth".
2. Lithium is not a conflict mineral.
3. Lithium is extracted from salt flats or brine. Neither process uses either children or slaves.
Congress no longer represents the people on the West Coast and the Northeast. It's heavily weighted towards the interests of less-populated central states. Remember, they get two Senators even if they have 1/10th the population of a Texas, New York, New Jersey, or California. This isn't representative government as much as a tyranny of a landed minority.
So charge at home overnight. You can charge at about 12kWh per hour off a 240V/50A circuit. 2.5 hr gives you enough charge (30kWh) to go 100 miles, whole day's driving and more for most people. If there are chargers at work, you can also charge there. Viola! Another 100 miles' range, 200mi per day.
50mpg is not a realistic number for fuel consumption on anything you'd be willing to buy.
The Chevy Volt and the Toyota Prius both do better than 50mpg, and plenty of people are willing to buy them. They are both based on years-old technology, so there's no reason (outside of laziness and a race-to-the-bottom mentality) that carmakers can't do even better going forward.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
White phosphorus actually is worse than napalm -- burns the skin, keeps burning even when "put out", and often kills people slowly from phosphorus poisoning.
Hydrogen has a lower power density than lithium batteries, and hydrogen comes from fosil fuels. Put power rails in the roads and your electric car only needs enough batteries to get from your driveway to the road.
"Lithium is extracted from salt flats or brine. Neither process uses either children or slaves"
Lithium is also extracted from lepidolite, which is in fact extracted in many countries with slave labor (which is incidentally children looking for lithium-borate gems within those lepidolite bodies.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, you can't. Not safely, anyway. By law, you have to de-rate circuits by 20% for continuous use like EV charging. So your 50A circuit provides 40A, which is only 9.6 kWh per hour.
The problem with your approach is that it doesn't scale. At 9.6 kWh per hour, in theory, you would need about four hours of charge per vehicle for that hundred-mile range. Unfortunately, that's actually a best-case estimate, because it assumes that your battery has at least a 200 mile range and is starting out empty.
In practice, lithium battery charging slows down as the battery gets closer to being full, which means that if putting 100 miles into an empty 300-mile battery would take four hours, putting 100 miles into an empty 100-mile battery would likely take closer to 6 hours. So unless your employer does some sort of staggered work hours, this effectively means that if every employee actually needed 100 miles of range each day, you would literally need one charger for each employee who owns an electric car. Providing five or ten 50A circuits per building is relatively easy. Providing 200 EV circuits per building is not.
The other big problem with your theory is the assumption that an EPA-rated 100-mile range is enough for a 50-mile round trip. That doesn't factor in things like heat in the winter, climbing hills, or the fact that smaller EV batteries lose on the order of 10% of their capacity every year. In five years, you'd better be ready to buy a new car, or else you'll find yourself not making it home.
You see, the other major advantage of a larger battery is that the larger capacity lets you leave a lot of charge in the bottom and never fully charge the cells all the way to the top. Deep discharging and full charging are hard on batteries, and avoiding both of those scenarios makes a big difference in their life expectancy.
Also, the larger capacity means that the batteries run down over 3x as many miles, which means they get a third as many cycles per mile. Those differences mean losing 5% of your charge after five years instead of 50%.
The bottom line is that 100-mile EVs are really quite impractical, and it isn't just because people are worried about needing to make longer trips. No improvements to the charging network can solve those fundamental problems, because you'll still be absolutely torturing their batteries. Anyone who buys a car that can't make at least three or four round trips per charge is likely to regret that decision. And if folks lease the cars instead, then the poor suckers who buy them used after three years are likely to regret their decisions even more. Building cars with such limited range just doesn't make sense.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Here is the full rule (1500 pages) for 2012-2016 if you'd like to read it, but I'll summarize a bit for you.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfi...
> fleet-wide averages, without as much exception for "trucks."
There are two (or more) completely separate fleets. Cars, light trucks, medium trucks (and busses), heavy trucks, motorcycles. There is no "exception", the two groups are computed entirely separately, based on entirely different MPG standards and different average lifetime miles.
For CAFE purposes, each company is essentially split into two companies - a truck company and a car company. (Also motorcycles and large trucks are computed entirely separate, as if they were different companies). You can read the full details in the EPA rules above.
So first the company does its cars. The first step on calculating the car standard is to find the average size (footprint) of the company's cars. I'll directly quote the EPA rule on this rather than trying to explain it in my own words:
--
EPAâ(TM)s final standards, like the standards NHTSA
promulgated in March 2009 for MY 2011, are expressed as mathematical functions depending on vehicle footprint. Footprint is one measure of vehicle size, and is
determined by multiplying the vehicleâ(TM)s wheelbase by the vehicleâ(TM)s average track width.
--
After finding the footprint, you look at the table (section 3, I think) that gives the formula for your range. Inputting the average footprint, the formula tells what the average fuel economy needs to be, in GALLONS PER MILE.
It's gallons per mile because a vehicle that gets 1MPG burns twice as much gas as one that gets 2MPG, but a vehicle that gets 99MPG is almost the same as one that gets 100MPG.
Subtract your company's ACTUAL average GPM for cars from the standard to get the amount of credit or debit. If the company is more efficient than required, it can either save those credits for next year, or sell the credits to another car company. Similarly, if this year's sales aren't efficient enough, the company can either use credits it earned in an earlier year, or buy credits from a more efficient company. (Credit brokers are allowed, but cannot actually own the credits, only bank them).
Once your done with the cars, you go through the same procedure, separately, for your motorcycles, then again completely separately for light trucks, etc.
I mentioned that a company that doesn't meet its target can buy credits from a company that the target. What Mack beats their heavy truck target, while BMW needs to buy credits for their cars? Mack has truck credits to sell, BMW wants to buy car credits. The public doesn't care whether a gallon of gas is burned in a motorcycle or a bus, they only care how much as is burned, so before trading companies can apply a formula to convert light truck credits to car credits, or car credits to medium truck credits or whatever. (It's not one-for-one, different kinds of credits are "worth" different amounts). Note that it may be Volvo's truck credits offsetting Ferrari's car debit. The Corporate in CAFE doesn't matter once you start trading different kinds of credits.
Just as GMC can convert truck credits to (fewer) car credits in order to sell them to Ferrari, GMC can also convert truck credits to car credits for Buick. GMC and Buick happen to be the same company, but GMC could just as easily trade those credits to a different company, maybe Ford or Volkswagen.
Again, the full details are in the actual rule linked above, but the summary is that car, light truck, medium truck, and heavy truck are computed completely separate, like separate companies. There is no averaging between cars and trucks.
Sorry, but not quite correct. The CAFE standards were first enacted by Congress in 1975 in order to save fuel, basically because oil cost so much at the time. Then they were amended in the clean air act of 1990 to also try and reduce particulate matter in the air, setting up two tiers of standards, designed to be phased in over time. At that point the President was allowed to grant States waivers to the federal standards.
From Wikipedia, "In 2009, President Obama announced a new national fuel economy and emissions policy that incorporated California's contested plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions on its own, apart from federal government regulations."
The Obama EPA basically took advantage of the CAFE process and ability to grant a waiver to CA to push the standards higher with the idea of limiting CO2, rather than the original law's purposes of fuel economy (saving gas) and reducing air particulate pollution. Now with a new Administration, that administrative rule making can be reversed.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Lithium can be extracted from lepidolite, but not much actually is.
Over 40% of the world's lithium supply comes from Australia, primarily spodumene mines like these. Chile and Argentina produce another 45% from brine evaporation, as is most of China's output which supplies around 7%. The rest comes from the USA, Canada, Brazil, Portugal, and 2% from petalite and spodumene mines in Zimbabwe.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?