Really? Isn't sprawl in and of itself a problem? Or do you like endless expanses of asphalt, never-ending parking lots, traffic jams, 'pod' living, having to shuttle kids everywhere, dismal, fast-aging strip malls, and just making large portions of our cities inhospitable to humans?
Ummm, yes I actually do. And I don't think I'm the only one. What you need is a vast mixture of industrial, residential, school and commercial all jumbled together.
But as I have stated over and over again, my goal is not to reduce my energy usage. My goal is to increase the sustainability of energy production.
In this case, the charts are talking about units of heat and says little about fuel consumption
No. Heat is directly related to fuel consumption. 1 gallon of fuel = x units of heat. It's in heat units so one can compare natural gas to diesel.
What doesn't come as a surprise most certainly is that it could be done better... far better.
Oh it can. By bulldozing the transport and putting in more roads to save energy. But that isn't trendy. Normal cars are close to transit systems in most scenarios anti-car activists would like to see transit. Hybrids beat transit. Eco-driven hybrids kill transit. EVs kill transit.
It would be great to see cities compete. All the ecocities would collapse and people would move to places like San Jose and Los Angeles or they would move to New York. Huge urban sprawl, which isn't a problem if you put in enough roads.
But even if we pretend that if everyone lived like americans and we used 10 times as much water around the world as we did in our borders, we'd use up some iron, some aluminum, and a small fraction of a desert.
I've typed many, many comments about EVs, fuels, nukes, solar, synthetics, etc. Over the coming weeks/months I'm going to write journals here called the Sustainable States of America about all the issues.
No. I realize that there are limits to growth. I think the limits are higher than you think they are and I have numbers to back it up. Everyone likes to talk about us not having the highest standard of living here. That's a matter of personal preference. I understand that in some people's view it is wasteful. But in others my decision not to have children is wasteful (I'd much rather have an SUV than a kid). And keep in mind that I'm not saying expand expand expand. We'll reach an equilibrium. I'm trying to increase efficiency, to push back the equilibrium so that everyone can have a higher standard of living. Our process for cleaning water is very inefficient at land use. So what we need to do is use some iron and aluminium to catalysis that process and speed it up, reducing space to produce water.
I cannot find the references to that graph. You'll have to point em' out.
Plus part of what you would like takes too big industrial backbone to be even possible; that not only brings its own problems, most of the world simply can't do it in forseable future
This argument in essence reveals your faults, simply ignoring everything that requires and industrial process because it is an industrial process. This is a form of circular reasoning. And I'm not going to waste anymore of my time with the argument.
^telling it like that reveals your faults. It should be "As a sidenote, there's ideas which would be nice but, with frustratingly high degree of certainity, aren't possible"
As far as I can see, the first is simply the second stated more plainly.
Ironically, us SUV loving Americans may have the leg up on Europe in the EV. Why? Because weight is less important in EVs than it is in gas cars because of regen. Batteries are really heavy, yet very small. So what you care about is really battery capacity / highway MPG (a measure of drag). I did some calculations (take with a salt mine instead of a grain of salt), that took in to account drag, battery capacity, and the peukert effect (an effect that makes batteries put out less energy the faster they are discharged). The results were quite interesting, using most payload for lead acid batteries (straight and level at 65 miles/hour):
Large Semi, Completely full of batteries: around 5000 mile range.
GMC Savana van, Completely full of batteries: around a 200 mile range.
Hummer H3 SUV, Completely full of batteries: around a 140 mile range.
Tesla Roadster Lead Acid: around a 60 mile range.
Smart Golf Cart^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Supermini: around 20 mile range.
The Savana lead acid, used as an electric vehicle to get to work would be more efficient than any gas supermini you could bring on. The semi, not so. But it was fun and proves the point: the bigger the car, the better the range.
This suggests transit is a bad idea. China is not going to be an oil powered car society. It is going to be a coal powered car society, love it or hate it.
P.S. In general, I take three positions on tech: good, too much resources, does not work. Some of the techs I stand behind are: Solar thermal. Nuclear. Wind. Solar thermochemical. Hydrocarbon synthesis. Nickel-iron batteries. Desal. Metal-air fuel cells. Waste biomass and trash gasification. You can convince me not to stand behind any of these techs by showing, explicitly, with a link to known reserves, that they use too much resources, or by proving that they don't work.
The resource limited techs I don't stand behind are for example standard Solar PV (indium) and standard Hydrogen Fuel Cells (platinum).
Finally, there's techs I'd love but I don't think they work. Like cold fusion. If that worked, that would be good.
I stand behind all of it. I support a mixed solution. If I show that each individual component of my system works on its own, that makes the whole thing a lot better. My guess is that if I only stated one tech, you'd accuse me of putting all my eggs in one basket. You have all your eggs in one basket. Conserve, conserve, conserve. Why don't you do that by moving to Africa or Cuba.
But what is the breakdown. How was this calculated? Can you point me to the detail calculation of this graph? Because otherwise, we don't know what is actually being stated.
Because I have no one pet tech. We have to work on all the techs at once, so that the techs can compete against each other and drag each others costs down. However, you are simply making ad-hominem attacks because you don't have any evidence for your argument. There is no ultimate savior technology - human creativity is the ultimate savior.
You have said that, but you have not backed it up with evidence. In our day and age, with so many false claims by so many, claims require evidence. Please state you evidence. I have stated mine, and you can disagree with it, but you have just repeated those claims over and over. The only real evidence you have brought forth is that graph that showed we used a lot of land, which x6 billion is still smaller than the total surface area of the earth. But there's no explanation of why. What do we use that land for? Factories? Power Plants? Oil Wells? Roads? Parks? Farms? Is it just space in the country / people in it? What?
It's out of site because it's a large corporate venture. Many people are looking at the flashy nanasolar panels made of unobtainium sheets because you could have them at your house. You really can't put 10000 RPM steam turbine in your house nor would you want a mirror array capable of reaching 1000 C in a few seconds on your roof. We also have this wonderful thing call the electricity grid to send all that energy around (it's surprisingly efficient). I don't think mass production beyond limits requires fantasy technology. I just think those limits in this case are so high that we won't hit them. I mean really, Iron mining, aluminium casting and smelting. Do you want me to drag you through all the carbon and energy intensity calculations of aluminium smelting that I did for aluminium fuel cell vehicles a while back? Here's the tech site. Of course nuclear could also do this, but desal is a good app for solar and wind.
Except that none of the technologies I listed were from fantasy land. They are existing technologies that are either slightly more expensive than fossil fuels or impeded by regulations. I can't bring everything new from fantasy land. Tell me the world uses 100 times as much gasoline as assumed it does, or a 100000 times as much water as calculated. Then I'll change. But so far, we haven't overwhelmed the system yet. Let me know.
I'm quoting the entire amount of freshwater in the united states. Double, triple, even quadruple that estimate and it still less than 1% of one desert. The reason it is not being done is because it is not yet profitable to go electricity -> water. Water will get more expensive, electricity will get cheaper, and it will happen more and more. Investors will have to look at numbers and decide when to invest in this business venture. ESolar is starting with solar -> electricity, because it is profitable, simple and workable. It is a Google-backed company.
It's like people who say for few decades "we can put an automated factory on the Moon in a decade, it will be self sufficient and..." - well then why they haven't done so on Earth?!
Except it's not. To put an automated factory on the moon, we need new technology. To do this, we need to mass-produce existing technology. The reason we don't have fully automated factories on the Earth is because people are cheaper than machines in places like China, somewhat sadly.
And you simply repeat the message of doom over and over again without explaining. My vision is based on reasoned arguments made with calculations. If those calculations are shown to be wrong or not to take something in to account, you could bring that up and I would change my position. However, you failed to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Isn't sprawl in and of itself a problem? Or do you like endless expanses of asphalt, never-ending parking lots, traffic jams, 'pod' living, having to shuttle kids everywhere, dismal, fast-aging strip malls, and just making large portions of our cities inhospitable to humans?
Ummm, yes I actually do. And I don't think I'm the only one. What you need is a vast mixture of industrial, residential, school and commercial all jumbled together.
But as I have stated over and over again, my goal is not to reduce my energy usage. My goal is to increase the sustainability of energy production.
To anyone who modded this anything but funny, wooooosh.
You know, after hearing this, I felt the need to write extensively about the subject on facebook, so everyone can see what I feel.
LEAVE THE SUN ALONE!
In this case, the charts are talking about units of heat and says little about fuel consumption
No. Heat is directly related to fuel consumption. 1 gallon of fuel = x units of heat. It's in heat units so one can compare natural gas to diesel.
What doesn't come as a surprise most certainly is that it could be done better... far better.
Oh it can. By bulldozing the transport and putting in more roads to save energy. But that isn't trendy. Normal cars are close to transit systems in most scenarios anti-car activists would like to see transit. Hybrids beat transit. Eco-driven hybrids kill transit. EVs kill transit.
It would be great to see cities compete. All the ecocities would collapse and people would move to places like San Jose and Los Angeles or they would move to New York. Huge urban sprawl, which isn't a problem if you put in enough roads.
Rethink mass transit.
But even if we pretend that if everyone lived like americans and we used 10 times as much water around the world as we did in our borders, we'd use up some iron, some aluminum, and a small fraction of a desert.
I've typed many, many comments about EVs, fuels, nukes, solar, synthetics, etc. Over the coming weeks/months I'm going to write journals here called the Sustainable States of America about all the issues.
Show me the math! You can see my water math in this thread. How much do we import? What do we import? Plastic, water, etc.
Here's one of my favorite essays on the subject.
P.S. population growth will stop when the world is developed.
No. I realize that there are limits to growth. I think the limits are higher than you think they are and I have numbers to back it up. Everyone likes to talk about us not having the highest standard of living here. That's a matter of personal preference. I understand that in some people's view it is wasteful. But in others my decision not to have children is wasteful (I'd much rather have an SUV than a kid). And keep in mind that I'm not saying expand expand expand. We'll reach an equilibrium. I'm trying to increase efficiency, to push back the equilibrium so that everyone can have a higher standard of living. Our process for cleaning water is very inefficient at land use. So what we need to do is use some iron and aluminium to catalysis that process and speed it up, reducing space to produce water.
I cannot find the references to that graph. You'll have to point em' out.
Plus part of what you would like takes too big industrial backbone to be even possible; that not only brings its own problems, most of the world simply can't do it in forseable future
This argument in essence reveals your faults, simply ignoring everything that requires and industrial process because it is an industrial process. This is a form of circular reasoning. And I'm not going to waste anymore of my time with the argument.
^telling it like that reveals your faults. It should be "As a sidenote, there's ideas which would be nice but, with frustratingly high degree of certainity, aren't possible"
As far as I can see, the first is simply the second stated more plainly.
Ironically, us SUV loving Americans may have the leg up on Europe in the EV. Why? Because weight is less important in EVs than it is in gas cars because of regen. Batteries are really heavy, yet very small. So what you care about is really battery capacity / highway MPG (a measure of drag). I did some calculations (take with a salt mine instead of a grain of salt), that took in to account drag, battery capacity, and the peukert effect (an effect that makes batteries put out less energy the faster they are discharged). The results were quite interesting, using most payload for lead acid batteries (straight and level at 65 miles/hour):
Large Semi, Completely full of batteries: around 5000 mile range.
GMC Savana van, Completely full of batteries: around a 200 mile range.
Hummer H3 SUV, Completely full of batteries: around a 140 mile range.
Tesla Roadster Lead Acid: around a 60 mile range.
Smart Golf Cart^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Supermini: around 20 mile range.
The Savana lead acid, used as an electric vehicle to get to work would be more efficient than any gas supermini you could bring on. The semi, not so. But it was fun and proves the point: the bigger the car, the better the range.
This suggests transit is a bad idea. China is not going to be an oil powered car society. It is going to be a coal powered car society, love it or hate it.
No. We'd double our CO2 emissions with coal to liquids technology. If we had more libertarianism, we'd have a rush on nuclear to liquids right now.
P.S. In general, I take three positions on tech: good, too much resources, does not work. Some of the techs I stand behind are: Solar thermal. Nuclear. Wind. Solar thermochemical. Hydrocarbon synthesis. Nickel-iron batteries. Desal. Metal-air fuel cells. Waste biomass and trash gasification. You can convince me not to stand behind any of these techs by showing, explicitly, with a link to known reserves, that they use too much resources, or by proving that they don't work.
The resource limited techs I don't stand behind are for example standard Solar PV (indium) and standard Hydrogen Fuel Cells (platinum).
Finally, there's techs I'd love but I don't think they work. Like cold fusion. If that worked, that would be good.
I stand behind all of it. I support a mixed solution. If I show that each individual component of my system works on its own, that makes the whole thing a lot better. My guess is that if I only stated one tech, you'd accuse me of putting all my eggs in one basket. You have all your eggs in one basket. Conserve, conserve, conserve. Why don't you do that by moving to Africa or Cuba.
But what is the breakdown. How was this calculated? Can you point me to the detail calculation of this graph? Because otherwise, we don't know what is actually being stated.
Ooops. I thought the graph was acres not hectacres. But I still don't understand where those acres are going.
Because I have no one pet tech. We have to work on all the techs at once, so that the techs can compete against each other and drag each others costs down. However, you are simply making ad-hominem attacks because you don't have any evidence for your argument. There is no ultimate savior technology - human creativity is the ultimate savior.
You have said that, but you have not backed it up with evidence. In our day and age, with so many false claims by so many, claims require evidence. Please state you evidence. I have stated mine, and you can disagree with it, but you have just repeated those claims over and over. The only real evidence you have brought forth is that graph that showed we used a lot of land, which x6 billion is still smaller than the total surface area of the earth. But there's no explanation of why. What do we use that land for? Factories? Power Plants? Oil Wells? Roads? Parks? Farms? Is it just space in the country / people in it? What?
It's out of site because it's a large corporate venture. Many people are looking at the flashy nanasolar panels made of unobtainium sheets because you could have them at your house. You really can't put 10000 RPM steam turbine in your house nor would you want a mirror array capable of reaching 1000 C in a few seconds on your roof. We also have this wonderful thing call the electricity grid to send all that energy around (it's surprisingly efficient). I don't think mass production beyond limits requires fantasy technology. I just think those limits in this case are so high that we won't hit them. I mean really, Iron mining, aluminium casting and smelting. Do you want me to drag you through all the carbon and energy intensity calculations of aluminium smelting that I did for aluminium fuel cell vehicles a while back? Here's the tech site. Of course nuclear could also do this, but desal is a good app for solar and wind.
Except that none of the technologies I listed were from fantasy land. They are existing technologies that are either slightly more expensive than fossil fuels or impeded by regulations. I can't bring everything new from fantasy land. Tell me the world uses 100 times as much gasoline as assumed it does, or a 100000 times as much water as calculated. Then I'll change. But so far, we haven't overwhelmed the system yet. Let me know.
It's like people who say for few decades "we can put an automated factory on the Moon in a decade, it will be self sufficient and..." - well then why they haven't done so on Earth?!
Except it's not. To put an automated factory on the moon, we need new technology. To do this, we need to mass-produce existing technology. The reason we don't have fully automated factories on the Earth is because people are cheaper than machines in places like China, somewhat sadly.
And you simply repeat the message of doom over and over again without explaining. My vision is based on reasoned arguments made with calculations. If those calculations are shown to be wrong or not to take something in to account, you could bring that up and I would change my position. However, you failed to do so.