And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.
Environmentalists made a huge mistake a long time ago fighting against nuclear.
Wind and solar have their place, and that's fine, but they aren't going to replace coal, oil, and natural gas in our lifetimes.
You say nuclear is impossible due to political reasons. You are correct, so perhaps you should work against that and change the perception of nuclear.
As for coal, oil, and natural gas not being "taxed" enough for your taste, you forget that it doesn't matter what the US or EU do, China is really all that counts, and you have no influence there.
China is burning 5 times as much coal today as the US is, in the next 5 years or so, China will grow their coal consumption by the current total amount the US burns. We could shut it all down tomorrow and in 5 years China will have replaced it all.
You're trying to stop the dam from overflowing by putting your finger in one hole. You claim "oh, but it helps, every little bit helps". No, sometimes it doesn't.
The Tesla's battery is also 53, 70 or 85 kWh whereas the average household uses around 1 kW (kWh/h) and certainly can get by with a few kWh of storage to handle its overproduction of solar during a day.
You didn't read the article, did you?
For $13,000, you get a 10kWh battery. The average home is using 900kWh in a month, or 30 per day.
This battery would provide, on average, about 8 hours of power.
In the end, it's just economics. Does solar + battery pay itself back in lowered electricity bills? If it does, nothing else matters.
It doesn't, and that is the problem.
It can be kinda, sorta masked with enough rebates and government tax dollars to LOOK like it does, but it really doesn't. It is just taking money out of the left pocket and putting it in the right and nothing has changed.
Scale it up to a million home and those tax incentives would have to go away.
You know, I'd love to let you right wingers have your way. I'd love to let you dig up every last lump of coal, the last gallon of crude tar, the last methane pocket. Drain the last aquifer, cut down the last redwood, strip mine the last of the copper and iron and aluminum, every outcropping of phosphate, and dump all the tailings in the river 'cuz it's cheaper.
Usually the problem with viewpoints such as yours is that you have a narrow worldview that assumes that you can simply decide these are problems and the whole entire world will go along with you.
It likely won't, and that is the 800lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about.
It doesn't matter what the US or Europe does, if China, India, Brazil, and Russia don't go along with it. For that matter, China alone makes or breaks a lot of it.
A big bunch of normal house hold energy usage goes into heating water
I'm not quite sure what you think a "big bunch" really is...
We have a pair of 50 gallon hot water tanks in our home. Out of our average $300 a month utility bill, about $10 a month of that goes to heat water. For a family of 5. That showers every day and washes clothes and has a dishwasher.
It is chump change, not worth caring about.
Natural gas is cheap and efficient. Changing the plumbing around to put in a solar hot water heater would cost money and take a long time to repay itself, and frankly while it sounds nice, there is a decent chunk of the year it wouldn't do much and the hot water heaters would still have to run.
We tend to use hot water in surges, so we need lots of it in the morning, for example. In January. When it is snowing outside.
I think we'll see the 'ownership' issue disappear over time.
Maybe... but people still buy their homes when it doesn't make sense.:)
People like to have stuff to call their own, even when it makes no sense.
In the aircraft market, airlines no-longer own their engines, they buy 'thrust' through programmes such as Rolls-Royce's 'power by the hour'.
Airlines generally DON'T use such programs, since they cost more than just buying the engines outright. Corporate owners often do it, due to the lack of large fleets to spread risks around. Also, you're using a really bad example, Airlines don't care, they are companies, not people.
People are funny creatures...
I'm not sure about US, but in UK we're already seeing people essentially give up ownership of their cars and move to a constant finance model with Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) payments.
We call that leasing in the US, and yes, you're really "renting" when you do that. However, you have exclusive use of the vehicle for 3 years.
While it changes the underlying contract, it doesn't change the fact that the car is YOURS for that time period.
This is changing the way that many people think about car ownership, it's only a small leap to move to a system where you pay for your car through usage and the service company ensures that you have a vehicle with a charged battery when you need it.
No, that isn't a "small leap", that is a huge, massive, giant cavern. The move from "this car is yours 100% of the time for the next three years" to "we'll have a car show up when you need one, but it may not be one you've driven before", is NOT a "small leap".
We're already seeing it in the music market, people are happy to pay for a music service rather than own CDs.
Yes, that is the trendy thing to say, but CDs still sell millions and millions and millions of copies. I just bought 2 more CDs last week. I'll own them forever, streaming services come and go.
People will try such services from time to time, and some people will be happy with them, right up until they discover that such services allow them to listen to music, but not specific music as that comes and goes with contracts.
Look at Netflix, it has TONS of stuff to watch, you could never watch it all... but stuff comes and goes from the service. If there are specific things you want to watch, you have to own them. A good example is Top Gear, it used to be on Amazon Prime Video, my wife and I were watching 2 or 3 episodes a week, until a month or so ago when it was removed from Prime. Now we'll have to buy it if we want to watch it.
You sound dangerously close to an AGW denialist, which doesn't really surprise me:)
Using the term "denialist" implies that only fools would disagree with you.
The science is far from settled. This is not "the Earth is not flat" type stuff.
Call me a skeptic, I'm not convinced that this is a problem, or a serious problem. But I also understand that we'd be rather foolish to do nothing and not pay attention either. The cost of being wrong is quite high.
Of course, I also feel the same way about large asteroids, and we don't do anything about watching for them either. They aren't likely to hit in our lifetime, but if they did, nothing else we spend money on would matter, now would it? Yet we do nothing. (the efforts we currently do don't amount to a hill of beans)
Anyway, while the augments for climate change are indeed compelling, the augments against it are as well.
Give me a battery with 200km range that can be charged overnight at my house or work and costs less than than $1000. This will be tipping point at which the ICE becomes extinct in major cities, and it's not that far away.
It would be wonderful if you turn out to be correct.
I guess it depends on what "not that far away" means to you... Perhaps 50 years is not far away...
I honestly don't think we'll see that in our lifetime.
Suggesting that we need to adapt electric engine + battery technology to serve SUVs and big pickup trucks is just a little disingenuous... What we actually need is for Americans (and others, but mostly Americans) to stop thinking that SUVs are a good idea. Just because lots of people have been buying a vehicle that is totally unsuitable for the usual use-case doesn't mean that we should try and work out how to make that continue. It means people need to learn to adjust their lifestyle to suit the realities of the world we live in, before they break it.
:) Good luck with that... Telling people to give up their way of life for... "reasons" isn't usually a good idea...
You might effect a small change over the years, as the generations turn over, much the way has been done with smoking, but you still have many millions of people who just don't give a damm and still smoke...
Of course the mistake was allowing the SUVs and minivans in the first place. You can thank our government and CAFE for that. The minivan was created in 1984 specifically because of the lower fuel economy allowed by light trucks (which is what a minivan is considered) vs. cars.
This is why in 70s, families drove station wagons and in the 90s they drove minivans and SUVs. CAFE killed the station wagon.
But that ship has sailed. If light trucks and cars were merged in CAFE now, in 2015, would this bring back station wagons? Probably not, but I could be wrong.
Yes, there are cases where something like a pickup truck is useful and a good choice. No, that does not describe most buyers of these vehicles.
That actually is not as true as you'd think. Ford's F-series of pickup has been the best selling vehicle of ANY TYPE for 32 years running, and 43 years running as best selling truck. 32 years ago, they weren't selling tons of loaded up Limited and Platinum models, they were selling work trucks.
The pickup truck is still the best way for the average business to have a fairly cheap work vehicle that carries stuff and does a lot. Huge numbers of pickups are sold in work trim with vinyl seats and a basic AM/FM stereo.
The Tesla has been judged the "best car ever" by Consumer Reports (not "best electric car" but "best car").
Yes, but it should be noted that price isn't a consideration in that claim.:)
Performance... 0-60 in 3.2 seconds... faster than anything except exotic sports cars.
The version that does that is well north of $100K. Priced right up there with exotic sports cars.
Every Tesla owner loves their car and would never give it up... no one suffers with a Tesla.
It takes only a single person to make that comment false, nothing that sells in the tens of thousands has 100% perfect happy customers.
In a few years you will have Teslas that anyone can afford.
So Elon Musk hopes, he hasn't done it yet. He might, and I wish him luck, but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
He has also not yet found out what selling large numbers of cars to your average customer is really like. It is one thing to sell $80-$100K cars to educated well off customers who want to make a statement, it is another to sell $30K cars to uneducated customers who just need transportation.
Hopefully the rest of the auto companies will get out of their trenches and make cars as good (or better).
GM is trying with the Volt, the challenge is building one for a reasonable price. If they had a $80k per car selling goal, they could make a much nicer vehicle, but who is going to pay $80k for a Chevy?
Ford went another direction with EcoBoost, but they probably understand that is a stopgap measure. The EV versions of their vehicles are not competitive. Look at the Ford Fusion Energi. 20 mile EV range for $40K for a fairly basic car. It does have a range extending engine, but that car is still way too expensive for what it is.
Carrying around a barrel of fossil fuel will some day seem odd.
Most oil deposits are pre-dino. There's a little dino in some fields, but most are rather less exciting.
:) Yes, I'm aware of that. Some are even newer! But calling them "dead dinos" makes the point that while new oil is being made in the ground every day, it isn't as much as we're consuming.
I will say that there does appear to be a WHOLE LOT MORE oil than people ever thought there was. My gut response is to point out the mistake of peak oil and the recent fraking boom completely destroying the peak oil charts.
That being said... the example given in the video posted in the last thread about the bottle of bacteria and 1 hour to fill it makes a great point. We could find triple the amount of oil tomorrow that we had yesterday, and while it buys us more time, it isn't really as much as "TRIPLE" makes it sound.
What about a situation where your used battery can be swapped in five minutes for a fully charged, 400 mile battery? The discharged battery could then be hooked up to a solar, wind driven or on the grid charger depending on the time of day and made ready for another car. These battery change stations could manage inventory using a vehicle wireless internet/GPS connected database and experience to make sure there were enough batteries for long distance travellers.
To be honest, my first gut response is "hell no", my truck is mine, my battery is mine, keep your grubby hands off it.
That being said, it is possible that is just resistance to change. Could you come up with a way for me to remove the battery from "ownership of the vehicle" the way gas is? Maybe. I'm entering the "I don't want to change my whole life anymore" years... the challenge is probably not the 25 year olds, it is the 45 year olds who simply don't want to change.
In fairness, if I'm taking a roadtrip, I know in advance when I'm going and I imagine most people would, so I could schedule batteries in advance. The times when I really NEED more than 200 miles of range in 1 day during a year can be counted on 1 or 2 hands. In August I'm driving from Texas to Flordia, about 1,800 miles. Clearly recharging would be a PITA for that, but I know in April that I'm going in August, so could there be hot swap batteries ready for me? Sure, of course.
Would this work for everyone? No. But it probably would work for most people.
Not quite so much in a Tesla. With their latest software, you put in your destination and it will plan your route based on supercharger locations. They're adding more all the time to make efficient routes. But wait... there's more! Not only do they route you to superchargers, the route planner tells you how long you have to spend at each location charging to get to the next charger.
How much charge does 10 min of charging get you? 10 min strikes me as the max amount of time that it can take before it becomes a problem. Filling up with gas is 5 min, but 10 min would be ok. I think 15 min is pushing it...
Of course, it brings back up another issue... You have to convince millions of people to change their habits because... "reasons" and "environment" and "stuff"...
That is a heck of an uphill climb. It can be done, but it likely will take a generation shift. I fully expect that the soonest you'll see 50% of the cars and trucks on the road being EVs is 50 years from now. By which point, if the doom and gloomers of global warming are correct, it will be too late.
In your analogy, though, I'd say that hybrids are the CFLs and that EVs are the LED bulbs. Early LED bulbs were pretty shitty, if you recall: outrageously expensive, weirdly colored, and not long-lived.
I honestly don't recall, they weren't on my RADAR at all until recently...
CFLs have mostly sucked their entire lives, both when they were new and today.:)
Until we come up with much better batteries, the Volt style "bring a generator with you" approach is certainly the most versatile.
The search for "much better batteries" has been going on for awhile. Will we get them? That is not guaranteed. I hope so of course.
One possible option is that if the Volt technology gets developed further, the engine can be made smaller and more efficient over time. Existing engines are optimized to drive a transmission and wheels, an engine optimized to run at one RPM and drive a generator strikes me as another design goal that could use a few years of work.
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As I have posted before, I drive a full size SUV, a Yukon XL. The question becomes, what kind of engine could you put in there to be a "range extender" and have it run for 40 miles on batteries? What would that cost?
It is worth pointing out that saving fuel driving a Volt is nice, but replacing a Chevy Cruz with a Chevy Volt doesn't actually move the needle very much. Replacing a Suburban with a "insert Volt version of Suburban" is likely to yield far more savings.
Consider that for 32 years running, the best selling vehicle of ANY TYPE (car or truck) in the United States has been the Ford F-series pickup truck. Considering just trucks, that number extends to 43 years (about a third of the entire history of automobiles, that is nuts!). There are tens of millions of them driving around, if not more... That is really the low hanging fruit of gas consumption, IMHO. The EcoBoost helps a bit, but not nearly as much as the conversion to EV would, in terms of total CO2 and pollution emitted.
I'd actually compare hybrids to CFLs. They still use gasoline, so the fuel savings are a fraction of what they could be, and they make enough compromises that they're horribly complicated, often don't perform well, etc...
EV cars ARE the LEDs of 5-10 years ago: Great for the most part, have a couple issues, but still mostly just too expensive.
You might be right, I have no problem being wrong if that happens...
I've said many times that the primary issues with EVs is cost. Not the cost of the Leaf, but the cost of the Tesla. If Tesla could profitably sell the Model S, as it stands now, for $30k without subsidies then they would have a real winner on their hands.
300 miles of range, nice looks, good technology, for $30k, they'd sell a million of them.
The short of it is, if today's batteries were cheap enough - no better density or anything else - electric cars would very quickly take over the market place.
You say that as if it were a statement of fact, something that "everyone knows".
I'm not convinced that is the case... Range issues are a concern, and people just don't like change...
Right now plug in vehicles of all types are 0.7% of vehicle sales in the US. Note that this includes stuff like the Chevy Volt that DON'T have range issues due to having a range extender engine.
The number of pure EVs are a rounding error. Cost is one reason, lack of customer interest is another. Price could help with that to some extent, but cost of the vehicle is only one consideration. Cost of fuel is another. If gas were $8 a gallon, then I think you'd be correct. At $2 a gallon, I just don't think most people care that much. What you save per month in gas at $2 a gallon for the average person switching to an EV just isn't worth the trouble.
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EVs strike me as quite similar to CFLs. No one really likes them, some people suffer with them, just until we get something else to replace them, which in this case is LED bulbs which don't have most of the issues of CFLs. I've just ordered another case of LEDs to replace the last of the CFLs in my home, which will be a 100% LED lighted home in a few weeks when they arrive.
CFLs suck, but Incandescent use too much power, LEDs are a nice replacement.
What is the LED version of the vehicle? A replacement for a dead dino burner, but not a pure battery car that has to be recharged.
You may, if you are so inclined... buy a brand new in box copy of MS Office 2003 right now, today, and it will work perfectly fine...
You don't have that option with Google Service X...
Microsoft would do well to remember that when making their own cloud services. Everyone doesn't want to be on the "newest thing" and sometimes older products work well...
With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of business by the schools that hire quality teachers. I would like to see a point where private schools are competing for the vouchers to the point where they are bragging about the quality of the teachers, the quality of their programs, etc... My town of 80,000 is small enough that you can drive from one end to the other in about 20 minutes but is big enough that it has about a dozen grade schools. If these dozen grade schools were completely released from regulation and were allowed to compete for students, they would all eventually take different approaches. Some of the crappy ones would go under and a few new ones would probably start up but I would like to see what would happen if 12 schools all had to put their best foot forward to attract students.
Now that I think about it, I think the 4Runner still is a body on frame, so that is another one... but the Highlander outsells it by a large margin these days...
We have been well trained that it is OK for the good guys to bend the rules to stop the bad guys.
In fairness, there ARE times when that is the case...
A good example is during the movie "The Peacemaker" with George Clooney.
A terrorist has a nuclear weapon in his backpack and is 10 blocks away from where he plans to set it off. He also plans to die, so if you confront him, he'll just set it off anyway.
The sniper who is supposed to shoot the bad guy has his shot blocked by a girl on her daddy's shoulders. He doesn't have a clear shot.
Do you shoot through the girl to hit the bad guy in that case?
Is the cop bad if he does? Is he good? Is that against the rules?
I was talking about this with my wife just now and thought of another way to put this...
Warren Buffet has gone on record saying that he pays a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary and that is wrong. He as proposed that wealthy people pay no less than 20% of their income in taxes, regardless of deductions.
To which many people have said, "Mr. Buffet, you can write a check to the US Treasury any time you like, put your money where your mouth is".
If Mr. Buffet wrote a check for $10 billion dollars to the US Treasury tomorrow, would it matter? Would it change the US Budget deficit? Would it balance the budget? Would it make any noticeable difference to the current US Debt?
The answer of course, is no, it wouldn't do any of those things. In fact, lets put those numbers into terms you can understand.
The current US Debt is over $18 Trillion dollars. Lets cut that down to normal people numbers. Lets take someone who works at Walmart for $9/hr. If they work full time, 40 hours a week, they make about $19,000 a year. That is about $1 per billion dollars of debt.
Mr. Buffet's $10 Billion dollar check, works out to just $10 at the same scale. Does $10 to a Walmart worker help? Sure, everything helps. Does it make a substantial difference to their life? No, it really doesn't.
Since there aren't likely a lot of Walmart workers here, add a zero and scale it up to a nice lead developers pay, $190,000 a year... $10 Billion dollars turns into $100.
Does $100 one way or another make a difference that is noticeable to someone making $190K a year?
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Mr. Buffet's point is that he alone can't make any difference to the outcome, it has to be a collective effort. The same is true with resource consumption.
I have seen that before, a great video that everyone should watch...
Of course, the question becomes, now what? Is our current rate of oil consumption growth sustainable? Sure, for a few years... Forever? Of course not...
I would submit that the single biggest problem we have is our population growth rate... You cannot conserve your way to success if you don't do something about the population growth...
A simple example is China and coal. The US could shut down all our coal plants tomorrow, turn them all off, regardless of the consequences. By 2020, China will have replaced it all. Right now China is burning 5 billion tons of coal a year. The US is burning about 1 billion tons. China is expected to hit 6 billion tons of coal in the next 5 years or so.
It is easy to say, "well, we all have to do our part", and "every little bit helps". But the truth is, it doesn't. Nothing I do one way or another will make any difference in the end. There are much larger changes that need to be made for the outcome to be changed by enough to matter.
I actually agree that we need to change our path, we can't keep adding a billion tons of coal every 5 years and have that be sustainable. But those changes have to happen at a worldwide scale. Nothing I do, nothing even the US does, matter, if everyone else isn't on board.
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As a side note, I posted in another reply that I've just spent about $400 buying LED bulbs to replace every bulb in my house. The payback period is, overall, about a year. It is a very logical decision that makes financial sense and also happens to reduce my carbon footprint. That is $400 worth of coal power that won't have to be produced in the next year.
The irony is that there are many people who don't like change, who are upset that incandescent bulbs are going away. CFLs do indeed suck, they have a flicker, aren't instant full brightness, etc. LEDs fix those problems. I had a few CFLs in my home, but never liked them, LEDs are very nice.
I rather feel that EVs are much like CFLs, the Chevy Volt technology is more like LEDs. EVs have a problem, in that people don't really want them. They sound nice, right up until people have to live with them. If EVs had 500 miles of range and recharged in 15 min and cost no more than a normal car, then sure, people would like them, but that isn't like to happen any time soon.
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The other issue is, just replacing gas cars with EVs doesn't solve anything long term. Yes, power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines are, some of that power can come from wind and solar, but if we don't stop the growth rate of car and people production, it won't matter. Cutting your emissions in half per vehicle mile doesn't help if you double the number of vehicle miles driven.
Solar and wind are growing nicely, but won't replace coal, oil, or natural gas any time soon. Nuclear could, if we could get over our "oh my god the nuclears!" nonsense. But we won't, because we're largely stupid emotional creatures that do not make logical decisions.
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TL;DR - I am happy to make some changes to my carbon footprint that make economic sense and do not impact my lifestyle too much, but anything much beyond that requires action at the international level, since this is a global problem and can only be solved if everyone gets on board.
On the contrary, I could easily afford a "nicer" car. I have chosen to drive something that takes into account that I'm not the only person in the world. You should explore the concept.
That is a nice, meaningless statement that says nothing...
You probably think you driving a crappy car somehow helps other people. I doubt it, but if it makes you feel better, more power to you.
Sure, but when you're starting from almost nothing, doubling sales isn't hard...
When you're at a very large number, growing will be very hard...
But it is worth pointing out that overall vehicle sales go up and down each yet more than the total EV sales.
Last year they were at 0.7%, they might break 1% this year, or maybe not with cheap gas. I don't see 5% happening within 10 years, but I could be surprised. Depends on how fast prices come down and how fast gas price goes up.
Another thing to consider is that regardless of how you may feel about global warming, California has some very aggressive goals for emission reductions by 2050.
Two things:
1. Does California count the emissions from power produced in another state against that total? If a coal plant in Arizona sends power to California, does that count in the number?
2. I am not at all convinced global warming is real, however I would agree there are good non-global warming reasons to reduce the amount of dead dinos that we burn, so I'm all for reducing it within reason.
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As a side note, I am totally for reducing our carbon footprint, where it makes sense. Regardless if CO2 is a threat or not, the pollution from burning stuff is bad, I think we all agree on that point.
This past month I've spent about $400 replacing every light bulb in my house with LED lights. My master bathroom alone was nuts, I had 10 of those G25 globe bulbs using 40w each. I replaced them with 5w LED bulbs. There is more light in there now and I've cut my power use by a factor of 8.
That is just common sense. I'll get my $400 back in about a year, maybe less. With that kind of payback, there is no excuse to not replace level incandescent bulb in every house in America. I even went ahead and replaced the lessor used bulbs, the payback on those might be a bit longer, but even 2 or 3 years still makes them worth doing, and it reduces my carbon footprint at the same time.
Rather than provide $7,500 tax credits for EVs, why not provide $7,500 worth of LED bulbs? I'll be willing to bet that you could just give away LED bulbs to everyone for how much is being spent to push EVs, and it would likely make more of a difference.
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And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.
Environmentalists made a huge mistake a long time ago fighting against nuclear.
Wind and solar have their place, and that's fine, but they aren't going to replace coal, oil, and natural gas in our lifetimes.
You say nuclear is impossible due to political reasons. You are correct, so perhaps you should work against that and change the perception of nuclear.
As for coal, oil, and natural gas not being "taxed" enough for your taste, you forget that it doesn't matter what the US or EU do, China is really all that counts, and you have no influence there.
China is burning 5 times as much coal today as the US is, in the next 5 years or so, China will grow their coal consumption by the current total amount the US burns. We could shut it all down tomorrow and in 5 years China will have replaced it all.
You're trying to stop the dam from overflowing by putting your finger in one hole. You claim "oh, but it helps, every little bit helps". No, sometimes it doesn't.
The Tesla's battery is also 53, 70 or 85 kWh whereas the average household uses around 1 kW (kWh/h) and certainly can get by with a few kWh of storage to handle its overproduction of solar during a day.
You didn't read the article, did you?
For $13,000, you get a 10kWh battery. The average home is using 900kWh in a month, or 30 per day.
This battery would provide, on average, about 8 hours of power.
In the end, it's just economics. Does solar + battery pay itself back in lowered electricity bills? If it does, nothing else matters.
It doesn't, and that is the problem.
It can be kinda, sorta masked with enough rebates and government tax dollars to LOOK like it does, but it really doesn't. It is just taking money out of the left pocket and putting it in the right and nothing has changed.
Scale it up to a million home and those tax incentives would have to go away.
You know, I'd love to let you right wingers have your way. I'd love to let you dig up every last lump of coal, the last gallon of crude tar, the last methane pocket. Drain the last aquifer, cut down the last redwood, strip mine the last of the copper and iron and aluminum, every outcropping of phosphate, and dump all the tailings in the river 'cuz it's cheaper.
Usually the problem with viewpoints such as yours is that you have a narrow worldview that assumes that you can simply decide these are problems and the whole entire world will go along with you.
It likely won't, and that is the 800lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about.
It doesn't matter what the US or Europe does, if China, India, Brazil, and Russia don't go along with it. For that matter, China alone makes or breaks a lot of it.
So... how do you plan to tell China what to do?
A big bunch of normal house hold energy usage goes into heating water
I'm not quite sure what you think a "big bunch" really is...
We have a pair of 50 gallon hot water tanks in our home. Out of our average $300 a month utility bill, about $10 a month of that goes to heat water. For a family of 5. That showers every day and washes clothes and has a dishwasher.
It is chump change, not worth caring about.
Natural gas is cheap and efficient. Changing the plumbing around to put in a solar hot water heater would cost money and take a long time to repay itself, and frankly while it sounds nice, there is a decent chunk of the year it wouldn't do much and the hot water heaters would still have to run.
We tend to use hot water in surges, so we need lots of it in the morning, for example. In January. When it is snowing outside.
I think we'll see the 'ownership' issue disappear over time.
Maybe... but people still buy their homes when it doesn't make sense. :)
People like to have stuff to call their own, even when it makes no sense.
In the aircraft market, airlines no-longer own their engines, they buy 'thrust' through programmes such as Rolls-Royce's 'power by the hour'.
Airlines generally DON'T use such programs, since they cost more than just buying the engines outright. Corporate owners often do it, due to the lack of large fleets to spread risks around. Also, you're using a really bad example, Airlines don't care, they are companies, not people.
People are funny creatures...
I'm not sure about US, but in UK we're already seeing people essentially give up ownership of their cars and move to a constant finance model with Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) payments.
We call that leasing in the US, and yes, you're really "renting" when you do that. However, you have exclusive use of the vehicle for 3 years.
While it changes the underlying contract, it doesn't change the fact that the car is YOURS for that time period.
This is changing the way that many people think about car ownership, it's only a small leap to move to a system where you pay for your car through usage and the service company ensures that you have a vehicle with a charged battery when you need it.
No, that isn't a "small leap", that is a huge, massive, giant cavern. The move from "this car is yours 100% of the time for the next three years" to "we'll have a car show up when you need one, but it may not be one you've driven before", is NOT a "small leap".
We're already seeing it in the music market, people are happy to pay for a music service rather than own CDs.
Yes, that is the trendy thing to say, but CDs still sell millions and millions and millions of copies. I just bought 2 more CDs last week. I'll own them forever, streaming services come and go.
People will try such services from time to time, and some people will be happy with them, right up until they discover that such services allow them to listen to music, but not specific music as that comes and goes with contracts.
Look at Netflix, it has TONS of stuff to watch, you could never watch it all... but stuff comes and goes from the service. If there are specific things you want to watch, you have to own them. A good example is Top Gear, it used to be on Amazon Prime Video, my wife and I were watching 2 or 3 episodes a week, until a month or so ago when it was removed from Prime. Now we'll have to buy it if we want to watch it.
You sound dangerously close to an AGW denialist, which doesn't really surprise me :)
Using the term "denialist" implies that only fools would disagree with you.
The science is far from settled. This is not "the Earth is not flat" type stuff.
Call me a skeptic, I'm not convinced that this is a problem, or a serious problem. But I also understand that we'd be rather foolish to do nothing and not pay attention either. The cost of being wrong is quite high.
Of course, I also feel the same way about large asteroids, and we don't do anything about watching for them either. They aren't likely to hit in our lifetime, but if they did, nothing else we spend money on would matter, now would it? Yet we do nothing. (the efforts we currently do don't amount to a hill of beans)
Anyway, while the augments for climate change are indeed compelling, the augments against it are as well.
Give me a battery with 200km range that can be charged overnight at my house or work and costs less than than $1000. This will be tipping point at which the ICE becomes extinct in major cities, and it's not that far away.
It would be wonderful if you turn out to be correct.
I guess it depends on what "not that far away" means to you... Perhaps 50 years is not far away...
I honestly don't think we'll see that in our lifetime.
Suggesting that we need to adapt electric engine + battery technology to serve SUVs and big pickup trucks is just a little disingenuous... What we actually need is for Americans (and others, but mostly Americans) to stop thinking that SUVs are a good idea. Just because lots of people have been buying a vehicle that is totally unsuitable for the usual use-case doesn't mean that we should try and work out how to make that continue. It means people need to learn to adjust their lifestyle to suit the realities of the world we live in, before they break it.
:) Good luck with that... Telling people to give up their way of life for... "reasons" isn't usually a good idea...
You might effect a small change over the years, as the generations turn over, much the way has been done with smoking, but you still have many millions of people who just don't give a damm and still smoke...
Of course the mistake was allowing the SUVs and minivans in the first place. You can thank our government and CAFE for that. The minivan was created in 1984 specifically because of the lower fuel economy allowed by light trucks (which is what a minivan is considered) vs. cars.
This is why in 70s, families drove station wagons and in the 90s they drove minivans and SUVs. CAFE killed the station wagon.
But that ship has sailed. If light trucks and cars were merged in CAFE now, in 2015, would this bring back station wagons? Probably not, but I could be wrong.
Yes, there are cases where something like a pickup truck is useful and a good choice. No, that does not describe most buyers of these vehicles.
That actually is not as true as you'd think. Ford's F-series of pickup has been the best selling vehicle of ANY TYPE for 32 years running, and 43 years running as best selling truck. 32 years ago, they weren't selling tons of loaded up Limited and Platinum models, they were selling work trucks.
The pickup truck is still the best way for the average business to have a fairly cheap work vehicle that carries stuff and does a lot. Huge numbers of pickups are sold in work trim with vinyl seats and a basic AM/FM stereo.
The Tesla has been judged the "best car ever" by Consumer Reports (not "best electric car" but "best car").
Yes, but it should be noted that price isn't a consideration in that claim. :)
Performance... 0-60 in 3.2 seconds... faster than anything except exotic sports cars.
The version that does that is well north of $100K. Priced right up there with exotic sports cars.
Every Tesla owner loves their car and would never give it up... no one suffers with a Tesla.
It takes only a single person to make that comment false, nothing that sells in the tens of thousands has 100% perfect happy customers.
In a few years you will have Teslas that anyone can afford.
So Elon Musk hopes, he hasn't done it yet. He might, and I wish him luck, but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
He has also not yet found out what selling large numbers of cars to your average customer is really like. It is one thing to sell $80-$100K cars to educated well off customers who want to make a statement, it is another to sell $30K cars to uneducated customers who just need transportation.
Hopefully the rest of the auto companies will get out of their trenches and make cars as good (or better).
GM is trying with the Volt, the challenge is building one for a reasonable price. If they had a $80k per car selling goal, they could make a much nicer vehicle, but who is going to pay $80k for a Chevy?
Ford went another direction with EcoBoost, but they probably understand that is a stopgap measure. The EV versions of their vehicles are not competitive. Look at the Ford Fusion Energi. 20 mile EV range for $40K for a fairly basic car. It does have a range extending engine, but that car is still way too expensive for what it is.
Carrying around a barrel of fossil fuel will some day seem odd.
Yes, that is likely to be the case.
Most oil deposits are pre-dino. There's a little dino in some fields, but most are rather less exciting.
:) Yes, I'm aware of that. Some are even newer! But calling them "dead dinos" makes the point that while new oil is being made in the ground every day, it isn't as much as we're consuming.
I will say that there does appear to be a WHOLE LOT MORE oil than people ever thought there was. My gut response is to point out the mistake of peak oil and the recent fraking boom completely destroying the peak oil charts.
That being said... the example given in the video posted in the last thread about the bottle of bacteria and 1 hour to fill it makes a great point. We could find triple the amount of oil tomorrow that we had yesterday, and while it buys us more time, it isn't really as much as "TRIPLE" makes it sound.
What about a situation where your used battery can be swapped in five minutes for a fully charged, 400 mile battery? The discharged battery could then be hooked up to a solar, wind driven or on the grid charger depending on the time of day and made ready for another car. These battery change stations could manage inventory using a vehicle wireless internet/GPS connected database and experience to make sure there were enough batteries for long distance travellers.
To be honest, my first gut response is "hell no", my truck is mine, my battery is mine, keep your grubby hands off it.
That being said, it is possible that is just resistance to change. Could you come up with a way for me to remove the battery from "ownership of the vehicle" the way gas is? Maybe. I'm entering the "I don't want to change my whole life anymore" years... the challenge is probably not the 25 year olds, it is the 45 year olds who simply don't want to change.
In fairness, if I'm taking a roadtrip, I know in advance when I'm going and I imagine most people would, so I could schedule batteries in advance. The times when I really NEED more than 200 miles of range in 1 day during a year can be counted on 1 or 2 hands. In August I'm driving from Texas to Flordia, about 1,800 miles. Clearly recharging would be a PITA for that, but I know in April that I'm going in August, so could there be hot swap batteries ready for me? Sure, of course.
Would this work for everyone? No. But it probably would work for most people.
Not quite so much in a Tesla. With their latest software, you put in your destination and it will plan your route based on supercharger locations. They're adding more all the time to make efficient routes. But wait ... there's more! Not only do they route you to superchargers, the route planner tells you how long you have to spend at each location charging to get to the next charger.
How much charge does 10 min of charging get you? 10 min strikes me as the max amount of time that it can take before it becomes a problem. Filling up with gas is 5 min, but 10 min would be ok. I think 15 min is pushing it...
Of course, it brings back up another issue... You have to convince millions of people to change their habits because... "reasons" and "environment" and "stuff"...
That is a heck of an uphill climb. It can be done, but it likely will take a generation shift. I fully expect that the soonest you'll see 50% of the cars and trucks on the road being EVs is 50 years from now. By which point, if the doom and gloomers of global warming are correct, it will be too late.
In your analogy, though, I'd say that hybrids are the CFLs and that EVs are the LED bulbs. Early LED bulbs were pretty shitty, if you recall: outrageously expensive, weirdly colored, and not long-lived.
I honestly don't recall, they weren't on my RADAR at all until recently...
CFLs have mostly sucked their entire lives, both when they were new and today. :)
Until we come up with much better batteries, the Volt style "bring a generator with you" approach is certainly the most versatile.
The search for "much better batteries" has been going on for awhile. Will we get them? That is not guaranteed. I hope so of course.
One possible option is that if the Volt technology gets developed further, the engine can be made smaller and more efficient over time. Existing engines are optimized to drive a transmission and wheels, an engine optimized to run at one RPM and drive a generator strikes me as another design goal that could use a few years of work.
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As I have posted before, I drive a full size SUV, a Yukon XL. The question becomes, what kind of engine could you put in there to be a "range extender" and have it run for 40 miles on batteries? What would that cost?
It is worth pointing out that saving fuel driving a Volt is nice, but replacing a Chevy Cruz with a Chevy Volt doesn't actually move the needle very much. Replacing a Suburban with a "insert Volt version of Suburban" is likely to yield far more savings.
Consider that for 32 years running, the best selling vehicle of ANY TYPE (car or truck) in the United States has been the Ford F-series pickup truck. Considering just trucks, that number extends to 43 years (about a third of the entire history of automobiles, that is nuts!). There are tens of millions of them driving around, if not more... That is really the low hanging fruit of gas consumption, IMHO. The EcoBoost helps a bit, but not nearly as much as the conversion to EV would, in terms of total CO2 and pollution emitted.
I'd actually compare hybrids to CFLs. They still use gasoline, so the fuel savings are a fraction of what they could be, and they make enough compromises that they're horribly complicated, often don't perform well, etc...
EV cars ARE the LEDs of 5-10 years ago: Great for the most part, have a couple issues, but still mostly just too expensive.
You might be right, I have no problem being wrong if that happens...
I've said many times that the primary issues with EVs is cost. Not the cost of the Leaf, but the cost of the Tesla. If Tesla could profitably sell the Model S, as it stands now, for $30k without subsidies then they would have a real winner on their hands.
300 miles of range, nice looks, good technology, for $30k, they'd sell a million of them.
The perfect replacement is an EV with a better battery (or supercapacitor).
Get me a battery with 400 miles of range that can be recharged in 5 minutes and I'm all ears.
I just don't think we'll see that in our lifetime, but I'd be happy to be wrong. :)
The short of it is, if today's batteries were cheap enough - no better density or anything else - electric cars would very quickly take over the market place.
You say that as if it were a statement of fact, something that "everyone knows".
I'm not convinced that is the case... Range issues are a concern, and people just don't like change...
Right now plug in vehicles of all types are 0.7% of vehicle sales in the US. Note that this includes stuff like the Chevy Volt that DON'T have range issues due to having a range extender engine.
The number of pure EVs are a rounding error. Cost is one reason, lack of customer interest is another. Price could help with that to some extent, but cost of the vehicle is only one consideration. Cost of fuel is another. If gas were $8 a gallon, then I think you'd be correct. At $2 a gallon, I just don't think most people care that much. What you save per month in gas at $2 a gallon for the average person switching to an EV just isn't worth the trouble.
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EVs strike me as quite similar to CFLs. No one really likes them, some people suffer with them, just until we get something else to replace them, which in this case is LED bulbs which don't have most of the issues of CFLs. I've just ordered another case of LEDs to replace the last of the CFLs in my home, which will be a 100% LED lighted home in a few weeks when they arrive.
CFLs suck, but Incandescent use too much power, LEDs are a nice replacement.
What is the LED version of the vehicle? A replacement for a dead dino burner, but not a pure battery car that has to be recharged.
Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released.
It goes MUCH further than that...
http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...
You may, if you are so inclined... buy a brand new in box copy of MS Office 2003 right now, today, and it will work perfectly fine...
You don't have that option with Google Service X...
Microsoft would do well to remember that when making their own cloud services. Everyone doesn't want to be on the "newest thing" and sometimes older products work well...
With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of business by the schools that hire quality teachers. I would like to see a point where private schools are competing for the vouchers to the point where they are bragging about the quality of the teachers, the quality of their programs, etc... My town of 80,000 is small enough that you can drive from one end to the other in about 20 minutes but is big enough that it has about a dozen grade schools. If these dozen grade schools were completely released from regulation and were allowed to compete for students, they would all eventually take different
approaches. Some of the crappy ones would go under and a few new ones would probably start up but I would like to see what would happen if 12 schools all had to put their best foot forward to attract students.
Amen, this!
Now that I think about it, I think the 4Runner still is a body on frame, so that is another one... but the Highlander outsells it by a large margin these days...
We have been well trained that it is OK for the good guys to bend the rules to stop the bad guys.
In fairness, there ARE times when that is the case...
A good example is during the movie "The Peacemaker" with George Clooney.
A terrorist has a nuclear weapon in his backpack and is 10 blocks away from where he plans to set it off. He also plans to die, so if you confront him, he'll just set it off anyway.
The sniper who is supposed to shoot the bad guy has his shot blocked by a girl on her daddy's shoulders. He doesn't have a clear shot.
Do you shoot through the girl to hit the bad guy in that case?
Is the cop bad if he does? Is he good? Is that against the rules?
I was talking about this with my wife just now and thought of another way to put this...
Warren Buffet has gone on record saying that he pays a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary and that is wrong. He as proposed that wealthy people pay no less than 20% of their income in taxes, regardless of deductions.
To which many people have said, "Mr. Buffet, you can write a check to the US Treasury any time you like, put your money where your mouth is".
If Mr. Buffet wrote a check for $10 billion dollars to the US Treasury tomorrow, would it matter? Would it change the US Budget deficit? Would it balance the budget? Would it make any noticeable difference to the current US Debt?
The answer of course, is no, it wouldn't do any of those things. In fact, lets put those numbers into terms you can understand.
The current US Debt is over $18 Trillion dollars. Lets cut that down to normal people numbers. Lets take someone who works at Walmart for $9/hr. If they work full time, 40 hours a week, they make about $19,000 a year. That is about $1 per billion dollars of debt.
Mr. Buffet's $10 Billion dollar check, works out to just $10 at the same scale. Does $10 to a Walmart worker help? Sure, everything helps. Does it make a substantial difference to their life? No, it really doesn't.
Since there aren't likely a lot of Walmart workers here, add a zero and scale it up to a nice lead developers pay, $190,000 a year... $10 Billion dollars turns into $100.
Does $100 one way or another make a difference that is noticeable to someone making $190K a year?
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Mr. Buffet's point is that he alone can't make any difference to the outcome, it has to be a collective effort. The same is true with resource consumption.
I have seen that before, a great video that everyone should watch...
Of course, the question becomes, now what? Is our current rate of oil consumption growth sustainable? Sure, for a few years... Forever? Of course not...
I would submit that the single biggest problem we have is our population growth rate... You cannot conserve your way to success if you don't do something about the population growth...
A simple example is China and coal. The US could shut down all our coal plants tomorrow, turn them all off, regardless of the consequences. By 2020, China will have replaced it all. Right now China is burning 5 billion tons of coal a year. The US is burning about 1 billion tons. China is expected to hit 6 billion tons of coal in the next 5 years or so.
It is easy to say, "well, we all have to do our part", and "every little bit helps". But the truth is, it doesn't. Nothing I do one way or another will make any difference in the end. There are much larger changes that need to be made for the outcome to be changed by enough to matter.
I actually agree that we need to change our path, we can't keep adding a billion tons of coal every 5 years and have that be sustainable. But those changes have to happen at a worldwide scale. Nothing I do, nothing even the US does, matter, if everyone else isn't on board.
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As a side note, I posted in another reply that I've just spent about $400 buying LED bulbs to replace every bulb in my house. The payback period is, overall, about a year. It is a very logical decision that makes financial sense and also happens to reduce my carbon footprint. That is $400 worth of coal power that won't have to be produced in the next year.
The irony is that there are many people who don't like change, who are upset that incandescent bulbs are going away. CFLs do indeed suck, they have a flicker, aren't instant full brightness, etc. LEDs fix those problems. I had a few CFLs in my home, but never liked them, LEDs are very nice.
I rather feel that EVs are much like CFLs, the Chevy Volt technology is more like LEDs. EVs have a problem, in that people don't really want them. They sound nice, right up until people have to live with them. If EVs had 500 miles of range and recharged in 15 min and cost no more than a normal car, then sure, people would like them, but that isn't like to happen any time soon.
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The other issue is, just replacing gas cars with EVs doesn't solve anything long term. Yes, power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines are, some of that power can come from wind and solar, but if we don't stop the growth rate of car and people production, it won't matter. Cutting your emissions in half per vehicle mile doesn't help if you double the number of vehicle miles driven.
Solar and wind are growing nicely, but won't replace coal, oil, or natural gas any time soon. Nuclear could, if we could get over our "oh my god the nuclears!" nonsense. But we won't, because we're largely stupid emotional creatures that do not make logical decisions.
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TL;DR - I am happy to make some changes to my carbon footprint that make economic sense and do not impact my lifestyle too much, but anything much beyond that requires action at the international level, since this is a global problem and can only be solved if everyone gets on board.
On the contrary, I could easily afford a "nicer" car. I have chosen to drive something that takes into account that I'm not the only person in the world. You should explore the concept.
That is a nice, meaningless statement that says nothing...
You probably think you driving a crappy car somehow helps other people. I doubt it, but if it makes you feel better, more power to you.
refusing to get your children vaccinated is behaving like an arsehole.
No, it isn't... you can think it is, you're welcome to that opinion, but you're not welcome to state it as an outright fact...
by your own article (US sales):
number of EVs sold in 2010 - 2011: 17,500
number of EVs sold in 2014: 123,000
Growth rate: 600%
By comparison overall car sales:
2011: 12,778,000
2014: 16,500,000
Growth rate: 29%
Sure, but when you're starting from almost nothing, doubling sales isn't hard...
When you're at a very large number, growing will be very hard...
But it is worth pointing out that overall vehicle sales go up and down each yet more than the total EV sales.
Last year they were at 0.7%, they might break 1% this year, or maybe not with cheap gas. I don't see 5% happening within 10 years, but I could be surprised. Depends on how fast prices come down and how fast gas price goes up.
Another thing to consider is that regardless of how you may feel about global warming, California has some very aggressive goals for emission reductions by 2050.
Two things:
1. Does California count the emissions from power produced in another state against that total? If a coal plant in Arizona sends power to California, does that count in the number?
2. I am not at all convinced global warming is real, however I would agree there are good non-global warming reasons to reduce the amount of dead dinos that we burn, so I'm all for reducing it within reason.
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As a side note, I am totally for reducing our carbon footprint, where it makes sense. Regardless if CO2 is a threat or not, the pollution from burning stuff is bad, I think we all agree on that point.
This past month I've spent about $400 replacing every light bulb in my house with LED lights. My master bathroom alone was nuts, I had 10 of those G25 globe bulbs using 40w each. I replaced them with 5w LED bulbs. There is more light in there now and I've cut my power use by a factor of 8.
That is just common sense. I'll get my $400 back in about a year, maybe less. With that kind of payback, there is no excuse to not replace level incandescent bulb in every house in America. I even went ahead and replaced the lessor used bulbs, the payback on those might be a bit longer, but even 2 or 3 years still makes them worth doing, and it reduces my carbon footprint at the same time.
Rather than provide $7,500 tax credits for EVs, why not provide $7,500 worth of LED bulbs? I'll be willing to bet that you could just give away LED bulbs to everyone for how much is being spent to push EVs, and it would likely make more of a difference.