As much as I consider myself an environmentalist, I completely agree with that.
I consider my self pro-environment, anti-environmentalist. We need a new name for ourselves, because the old name has been corrupted.
But times have changed, technology has evolved, and we can now go nuclear without meltdowns or nukes. We should already have gone nuclear years ago.
Yep. Thanks for being willing to change with the times. Not many people have the courage to admit they were wrong or their beliefs have been rendered obsolete.
It's not quite that bad. 1 megawatt is more like it.
Yeah, that's true. Gas stations put out around 10 gallons/minute, and in a 20 MPG car that translates to 200 miles/minute. So it really is more like 3 megawatts for the exact same refuel rate. That said, it is not as bad as I thought. It still is pretty bad, and likely infeasible for the near future.
It's been suggested that stations on weaker parts of the power grid might have local batteries, to level out their load.
That's theoretically economically impossible, unless the cost of electricity were to more than double. See above.
Batteries that can take charge rates like that don't exist yet. There are claims from the "nanotechnology" crowd that they will be available Real Soon Now. We'll see. 15 minute charge, though, is feasible now. That can be addressed with marketing; the combo gas station/Burger King/Starbucks/grocery store might work.
Cheap chinese NiMH can do fast charging in 15 minutes. I think I read about cheap NiCd that can do fast charging in under 15 minutes, I'll see if I can dig up that info. Nanotechnology is too expensive, especially when a cheap chinese NiCd can do a better job.
If 10% of those need a Tesla-sized recharge, that's about 50KWh per car, or 1600*50 KWH/hr, or 8 megawatts per service plaza per direction, or 16MW per service plaza, or 80MW for 100 miles of road. That's big, but not unreachable.
If that's the case, America's 46,726 miles of highway would need 3.7 terrawatts. That's way to high of an estimate. The 10 percent of cars is too big in the previous analysis. Looking at it another way, each of the 100,000 odd gas stations needs 10 pumps, or 10 megawatt lines. A total of about 4274251 million vehicle miles are travelled per year. Roughly 20161561320 fast charges would be needed per year, or 555 charges per gas station per day. If they were all spaced, that would be only 1 charger per gas station, but they won't be. I don't think the grid could take it.
You are totally right about Better Place. I think it will be a disaster, the virtudyne of the green business. Looking at how much gadgetry is in a battery swap station (see the videos they have), and just ask, how much it would cost to replace all 100,000 odd gas stations in the USA. It would just be insane. Then realize that inorder to have a hope of replacing a gas car, you'd have to have at least 200 miles of range. In real terms, that's 20-30 thousand per battery pack. It is just ridiculous.
1) fast charging technology won't work, so battery changing will be necessary
This one probably won't be true. Most wires just can't give out enough power. Recharging a car at speeds at which a gas car is charged takes around 5 megawatts. That means that 10 of my local costco gas stations = 1 powerplant.
2) leasing battery packs is a viable business
With current battery prices, it can never be a viable business model. Most batteries cost too much per unit of energy stored. For example, a lithium ion costs ~0.5 dollars per watt*hour of energy stored, but runs 1000 cycles. Which works out to the battery costing 50 cents per kilowatt hour, 5 times as much as the raw electricity. You can go cheaper, and perhaps below threshold of batteries costing more than all the electricity they store.
3) enough cars can be designed around the standard battery packs to make this work
That's a major problem. How are they going to put those batteries in an SUV? A delivery truck? Can we convert cars to better place electrics?
4) they can standardize the infrastructure around their standards.
Yep. Good luck with that, especially when all the Vogons at the NHTSA, EPA, CARB, and the insurance companies start to mess around with that.
Or, for 7000 bucks you can order up a bunch of generators in stick em' in the car. Cut the battery pack to 40 miles of range, and solve the battery sticker shock problems.
Two questions from someone who wants to understand EV economics:
1. What about time of day metering in your location? (I.E., charge at night?)
2. What is your state? Is it coal powered?
You actually have the right idea with the big car. Old toyota pickups full of lead acids are the mainstay of DIY EV converters (I'm not one, just an observer). Why? because they have a high MPG*payload product, and thus can handle the weight. Lead-acid is ready to roll, right now. Li-ion is just too expensive right now. LiFePO4 might be there but really hasn't been proven yet. NiMH might be the dark horse candidate. So we're stuck with lead-acid, for all its suckyness.
In terms of convertible vehicles, I like toyota pickups, vans, and toyota highlanders. Why? I wrote a simulator that simulates drag, battery effects, and a bunch of other stuff and figures out the range of an electric car. Vans, hummers, and the like came out on top in terms of range. Highlander had the highest MPG*payload product.
Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers. If they were gone, we would have no CO2 from electricity today. We already have the technology to make gasoline and diesel in nuclear powerplants, it just needs to be put together and scaled up. So, we would likely have no CO2 from cars today, either.
Doomsayers have been saying we'd starve by 1980, then 1990, then 2000, then 2010, then 2020. When will they realize that the principles of Malthus are simply wrong at their core? Julian Simon, a man before his time, took a bet about resource scarcity with doomsayers. The doomsayers lost, big.
The thing I am interested in about ground source heat pumps is that I have read that temperatures in the ground go down to 55 F at 4 feet and hold relatively constant. Below that, they get hotter. What I am interested in is how this relates to the metal gadolinium (and some other compounds). Gadolinium is magnetic at below 65 F, and non-magnetic above. If you have a gadolinium (or gadolinium plated) wheel immersed in a 70 F bath of water, and cooled by a 55 F air/water source, part of the wheel will be magnetic and part not. If a magnet is placed against the wheel, it will spin with great torque, thus generating electricity.
Like I said in replay to the other post, the only problem is I don't know if my parents would like my green energy obsession to involve nearly a full rebuild of their house. Thanks for the links. That adsorption heat pump, especially.
All that's good. Thanks. The only problem is I don't know if my parents would like my green energy obsession to involve nearly a full rebuild of their house.
Pretty much no one. If one did own such a house, unless they are doing aluminium smelting, their electricity consumption would probably be lower. Less lights and all. The goal with solar is to get it so that the electricity generation of a solar panel per unit area is larger than the electricity consumption per area of the house.
There are some very interesting projects that people have done for alternative methods of cooling homes.
Do you have any good links on this regard? I'm quite interested in this. I've been looking at (though not building yet) distillation refrigerators using solar heat as fuel.
FYI, at 20 percent efficiency in California, here's the math. One watt-peak = 2 kWh/year. One house = 11040 kWh/year, thus = 5520 watts peak. At 1 kW/m^2 (100 percent), you get 5.5 m^2, which means 2.3 meters (7.7 feet) on a side. At 40 percent, you get 13.7 m^2 = 3.7 meters (12 feet) on a side. At 20 percent you get 27.6 m^2 = 5.5 meters (17.23 feet) on a side. At 10 percent you get 55.2 m^2 = 7.4 (24.3 feet) meters on a side.
The DoT report says (just before table 2.15, and other places) that the data between the different modes isn't comparable...
DOT report, chapter 2, page 15: (help! I'm turning into a bureaucrat)
Great care should be taken when comparing modal energy intensity data among modes. Because of the inherent
differences among the transportation modes in the nature of services, routes available, and many additional factors,
it is not possible to obtain truly comparable national energy intensities among modes. These values are averages,
and there is a great deal of variability even within a mode.
In essence, they are stating that there are many small factors that effect the results, not that the modes are completely incomparable. They are also talking about the difficulties of comparing gas and diesel to electric.
Electricity is cheap. There's not much incentive to reduce the electricity consumption of a train.
Ridiculously so. Electricity for a Tesla or Rav4 for 100 miles is $1.25 to $2.5 dollars. Trains are actually really efficient from a raw technical prospective. They already use regenerative braking, and they are designed with big, efficient motors. Some electric motors can be up to 99.9 percent efficient. I have no idea how efficient train motors are, but I don't think trains have much room for improvement.
(I assume you mean electric cars?)
No. Gas cars and hybrids too. The negative externalities of a bus are huge, and can only be bigger than a car. They use more energy and do more damage to the roads. The negative externalities of a train are great because of the high costs of building the train line. If we got buses and trucks of the road or made them pay their fair share, cars would generate revenue.
There are some hybrid trains, if this becomes a problem, but I'd be surprised if it does: you may as well put a big battery near the railway line. (Or any other way of storing power.)
We could just as easily stick that battery in my car and get 40 miles of range. 40 miles + generator means 80 percent of all car trips are electric.
Then this all depends whether we're trying to make sprawl efficient, or make people efficient.
We're trying to give people what they voted for, sprawls, and make it efficient. In that light, a car is the best option.
I pay for some road maintenance, yet I hardly use them (95% of my on-road distance is by bicycle, which -- by the same damage formula -- doesn't need the expensive road), and I don't particularly care who pays -- that's easy to solve. Cars at the moment pay less than they should, at least within towns. The infrastructure cost to carry thousands of rail passengers (and freight) by road would be enormous.
Repeat after me, cars fund 80 percent of road expenditures. Transit fund 25 percent. If we got rid of buses and trucks, it would be fine. In essence, in order for cars to pay for roads and subsidise buses and trucks, we need an additional 17 cents a gallon gas tax. link. You'll have
Leaving so much space that you can't hear the cars is presumably increasing the length of your journey. I guess if everyone is in a car there's no one outside to hear the noise (except the people living near the main road).
Except I don't live near a main road, and I'm not all that far away from the road (about 40 feet from the road outside my house right now).
BTW, thanks for actually engaging in a civilized debate. That's kind of rare on these subjects, in my experience.
That link is hardly unbiased. The title is loaded, and the guy's clearly anti-public-transport (and anti walking and cycling).
That's an irrelevant point. Most of the other stuff out their is anti-car biased, so I guess we can ignore it for being biased, no? What matters is the validity of his arguments. All the data is a direct copy from a DOT report - linked in the article. You'll see that it is accurate and valid. If you disagree with the DOT, you'll have to find another source.
- he's comparing things like jet airlines to trams to electric scooters. These transport modes don't compete.
He's doing that deliberately so we can see all the transit modes at once. You are free to ignore any one you don't like.
- he's used the overall car energy consumption (highway + city + everything) and compared it with frequent-stopping rail. He hasn't included long distance rail or long distance buses/coaches, presumably because they're very efficient, and he hasn't included city driving, presumably because it's inefficient.
The city MPG of non-hybrid cars is not that much lower than the highway MPG, but that is a very valid criticism of this paper. However, that result is only a factor of twenty percent in the cases I looked at (comparing car's average and city MPG).
- in the related link, he compares imaginary cars from the future (weighing 100-200lb)
Those cars aren't imaginary. We can build one right now, it just won't be very safe. That's why he promotes robocars (which I have my own opinions about). What he's really talking about is an electric bike/motorcycle/trike, which is the most efficient method of motorised transport in the US, hands down. If you notice, he compares electric vehicles with Japanese light rail, and note that a solo Tesla (many small EV cars like the Rav4 have strikingly similar results) has similar efficiency. If you put the average number of people in that car, you get virtually the same exact number. The Japanese do only %50 of their miles in cars, the lowest in the G8, so I think they might know something about public transport.
- no externalities are considered. A bicycle in use produces no pollutants at all, a car does, trains produce the pollutants in a single place (at the power plant) where they can (if we want to) be collected. Cars take up lots of space (i.e. cause congestion), bicycles much less, trains even less. Cars need to be parked, eight bikes can use the same space, trains don't need to be parked where space is a premium (perhaps include the station building area here). Cars need a very smooth, high maintenance, wide road. Commuter trains need a medium maintenance narrow track, bicycles need a low-maintenance medium width path. Cars are noisy, trains quieter, bikes very quiet.
I'm currently working on a giant report that includes all the externalities, including noise, health, and route costs. The preliminary results are strikingly in favor of cars, unless you put a very big premium on CO2. We're talking very big, higher than most CO2 taxes.
Responding to criticism one by one:
A bicycle in use produces no pollutants at all - that's true, but their are health consequences to riding bicycles. I have not taken into account all the costs, but the cost of broken bones + knee damage are all issues we will be looking at.
trains produce the pollutants in a single place (at the power plant) - yep, and so do electric vehicles. They produce less pollutants as well because they are electric and more efficient by nature. They have a problem though, they run during the day, and I'm not sure if new powerplants need to be built to handle train demands. Going 70 percent electric would mean no new powerplants if we charge at night. You are totally right out the pollution of the internal combustion engine, and why it needs to go away.
Cars need to be parked, eight bikes can use the
What he meant by read a book was try to gain some nuanced understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps the best you can muster is the depth of a dictionary, but I still have faith that you can do better.
What deeper understanding do you want? This term has been so abused throughout the world to mean so many different things, that it is meaningless. First you have to pick one of the definitions of the term, to gain a deeper understanding. If you want to market your philosophy, you are more than welcome to do so, but I really, really encourage you to pick a different name, preferably one that does not include the word "socalism".
No. It blows away many lithium-ions by volumetric energy density. It blows away lithium-ions in cost per cycle*wHr, especially these flooded cells. It is much easier to use, safer, and more tolerant of abuse.
In your "real" economic system, corporations wouldn't have to bribe and lobby their way out of things like being punished for ruining the environment, or exploiting workers, or fucking people over with loopholes in contracts, or by grabbing cash out of the bank vaults and fleeing the country. They'd just do it in broad daylight, without fear of consequences at all.
Umm, in my real economic system, the courts would actually make you pay for the consequences of environmental damage. Think about if BP had to pay for the spill for real. The problem is that BP and friends bribed the government to limit their liability to 500 million.
European public transport proves without a shadow of a doubt that it is progress. They use less than half the oil we do per capita. If you half ass investment in public transportation, it's a waste of money, just like if you started letting roads and bridges collapse, cars would stop being useful at a certain point.
No, it doesen't. The reason they use half as much oil as we do is because they drive 0.4 as much and have 0.6 times less fuel intense vehicles. This is not do to public transport as 85 percent of all ground trips are by car (compared with 92 percent in the USA). 0.4 * 0.6 = 0.24. Why do they use only half as much oil, then? If you'd looked at the previous link, you'd see how bad transit really is.
And why shouldn't your vehicle be taxed? Who's going to pay for roads? Do you live inside of a Disney cartoon?
Do you even read what I write? I not only said my vehicle should be taxed (as a user fee), I even said exactly how much my vehicle should be taxed for being a car. 3 US cents / mile. Now, how much should it be taxed for having a fossil fuelled internal combustion engine? That's a whole nother story.
FYI, this is due to the expansion of the visible universe projected out from what we can see. I.E., we see a galaxy 13 billion light years out moving away from us at near C, and now it is 46 billion light years away.
I will read you one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, to be exact.
1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
When republicans allow corporations to have no-bid contracts, and to bribe legislators, these corporations in essence become part of the government. Socialism is coerced, but unequal sharing (see defs above). Therefore, when they allow corporations to take without paying back, they are performing coerced but unequal sharing. Also known as socialism.
Communist: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his need
Socialist: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his need, with a bit extra for the people we think produce more
Corporate socialist/aristocrat: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his connections
Capitalist: From each according to his desire, to each according to his capital
Bailout: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his lack thereof
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As much as I consider myself an environmentalist, I completely agree with that.
I consider my self pro-environment, anti-environmentalist. We need a new name for ourselves, because the old name has been corrupted.
But times have changed, technology has evolved, and we can now go nuclear without meltdowns or nukes. We should already have gone nuclear years ago.
Yep. Thanks for being willing to change with the times. Not many people have the courage to admit they were wrong or their beliefs have been rendered obsolete.
You're a member of what Jullian Simon calls the flat-earth society?
Anyway, I thought this link might be of interest (PDF).
It's not quite that bad. 1 megawatt is more like it.
Yeah, that's true. Gas stations put out around 10 gallons/minute, and in a 20 MPG car that translates to 200 miles/minute. So it really is more like 3 megawatts for the exact same refuel rate. That said, it is not as bad as I thought. It still is pretty bad, and likely infeasible for the near future.
It's been suggested that stations on weaker parts of the power grid might have local batteries, to level out their load.
That's theoretically economically impossible, unless the cost of electricity were to more than double. See above.
Batteries that can take charge rates like that don't exist yet. There are claims from the "nanotechnology" crowd that they will be available Real Soon Now. We'll see. 15 minute charge, though, is feasible now. That can be addressed with marketing; the combo gas station/Burger King/Starbucks/grocery store might work.
Cheap chinese NiMH can do fast charging in 15 minutes. I think I read about cheap NiCd that can do fast charging in under 15 minutes, I'll see if I can dig up that info. Nanotechnology is too expensive, especially when a cheap chinese NiCd can do a better job.
If 10% of those need a Tesla-sized recharge, that's about 50KWh per car, or 1600*50 KWH/hr, or 8 megawatts per service plaza per direction, or 16MW per service plaza, or 80MW for 100 miles of road. That's big, but not unreachable.
If that's the case, America's 46,726 miles of highway would need 3.7 terrawatts. That's way to high of an estimate. The 10 percent of cars is too big in the previous analysis. Looking at it another way, each of the 100,000 odd gas stations needs 10 pumps, or 10 megawatt lines. A total of about 4274251 million vehicle miles are travelled per year. Roughly 20161561320 fast charges would be needed per year, or 555 charges per gas station per day. If they were all spaced, that would be only 1 charger per gas station, but they won't be. I don't think the grid could take it.
1) fast charging technology won't work, so battery changing will be necessary
This one probably won't be true. Most wires just can't give out enough power. Recharging a car at speeds at which a gas car is charged takes around 5 megawatts. That means that 10 of my local costco gas stations = 1 powerplant.
2) leasing battery packs is a viable business
With current battery prices, it can never be a viable business model. Most batteries cost too much per unit of energy stored. For example, a lithium ion costs ~0.5 dollars per watt*hour of energy stored, but runs 1000 cycles. Which works out to the battery costing 50 cents per kilowatt hour, 5 times as much as the raw electricity. You can go cheaper, and perhaps below threshold of batteries costing more than all the electricity they store.
3) enough cars can be designed around the standard battery packs to make this work
That's a major problem. How are they going to put those batteries in an SUV? A delivery truck? Can we convert cars to better place electrics?
4) they can standardize the infrastructure around their standards.
Yep. Good luck with that, especially when all the Vogons at the NHTSA, EPA, CARB, and the insurance companies start to mess around with that.
Or, for 7000 bucks you can order up a bunch of generators in stick em' in the car. Cut the battery pack to 40 miles of range, and solve the battery sticker shock problems.
Two questions from someone who wants to understand EV economics:
1. What about time of day metering in your location? (I.E., charge at night?)
2. What is your state? Is it coal powered?
Good luck getting some insight in to the Insight.
You actually have the right idea with the big car. Old toyota pickups full of lead acids are the mainstay of DIY EV converters (I'm not one, just an observer). Why? because they have a high MPG*payload product, and thus can handle the weight. Lead-acid is ready to roll, right now. Li-ion is just too expensive right now. LiFePO4 might be there but really hasn't been proven yet. NiMH might be the dark horse candidate. So we're stuck with lead-acid, for all its suckyness.
In terms of convertible vehicles, I like toyota pickups, vans, and toyota highlanders. Why? I wrote a simulator that simulates drag, battery effects, and a bunch of other stuff and figures out the range of an electric car. Vans, hummers, and the like came out on top in terms of range. Highlander had the highest MPG*payload product.
I know of a another plant, a very cheap one. It can generate far more than hemp or trees.
It takes days to grow.
It needs no fertilizer, insecticide, only seawater
It grows almost anywhere you like, and that covers a big area
People spend a great deal trying to get rid of it every year
Crush it, press it, throw it in to a coal power plant. Gasify it, turn it in to oil
No GM needed.
The plant?
Algae.
(cue general commentary about how a technological solution is infeasible, thus all are, how water is a crisis when there is an ocean of it, etc.)
>>>We should change our behaviour,
Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers. If they were gone, we would have no CO2 from electricity today. We already have the technology to make gasoline and diesel in nuclear powerplants, it just needs to be put together and scaled up. So, we would likely have no CO2 from cars today, either.
Doomsayers have been saying we'd starve by 1980, then 1990, then 2000, then 2010, then 2020. When will they realize that the principles of Malthus are simply wrong at their core? Julian Simon, a man before his time, took a bet about resource scarcity with doomsayers. The doomsayers lost, big.
Wow. Good link.
The thing I am interested in about ground source heat pumps is that I have read that temperatures in the ground go down to 55 F at 4 feet and hold relatively constant. Below that, they get hotter. What I am interested in is how this relates to the metal gadolinium (and some other compounds). Gadolinium is magnetic at below 65 F, and non-magnetic above. If you have a gadolinium (or gadolinium plated) wheel immersed in a 70 F bath of water, and cooled by a 55 F air/water source, part of the wheel will be magnetic and part not. If a magnet is placed against the wheel, it will spin with great torque, thus generating electricity.
Like I said in replay to the other post, the only problem is I don't know if my parents would like my green energy obsession to involve nearly a full rebuild of their house. Thanks for the links. That adsorption heat pump, especially.
All that's good. Thanks. The only problem is I don't know if my parents would like my green energy obsession to involve nearly a full rebuild of their house.
Pretty much no one. If one did own such a house, unless they are doing aluminium smelting, their electricity consumption would probably be lower. Less lights and all. The goal with solar is to get it so that the electricity generation of a solar panel per unit area is larger than the electricity consumption per area of the house.
Classic rock + classical + video game music + trance + heavy metal + weird al parodies.
Congrats on getting the sig joke.
I disagree. Let's assume I can sell you a very very cheap solar cell that runs at 2% efficiency.
We already have that. It's called biofuel.
There are some very interesting projects that people have done for alternative methods of cooling homes.
Do you have any good links on this regard? I'm quite interested in this. I've been looking at (though not building yet) distillation refrigerators using solar heat as fuel.
FYI, at 20 percent efficiency in California, here's the math. One watt-peak = 2 kWh/year. One house = 11040 kWh /year, thus = 5520 watts peak.
At 1 kW/m^2 (100 percent), you get 5.5 m^2, which means 2.3 meters (7.7 feet) on a side.
At 40 percent, you get 13.7 m^2 = 3.7 meters (12 feet) on a side.
At 20 percent you get 27.6 m^2 = 5.5 meters (17.23 feet) on a side.
At 10 percent you get 55.2 m^2 = 7.4 (24.3 feet) meters on a side.
The DoT report says (just before table 2.15, and other places) that the data between the different modes isn't comparable...
DOT report, chapter 2, page 15: (help! I'm turning into a bureaucrat)
Great care should be taken when comparing modal energy intensity data among modes. Because of the inherent differences among the transportation modes in the nature of services, routes available, and many additional factors, it is not possible to obtain truly comparable national energy intensities among modes. These values are averages, and there is a great deal of variability even within a mode.
In essence, they are stating that there are many small factors that effect the results, not that the modes are completely incomparable. They are also talking about the difficulties of comparing gas and diesel to electric.
Electricity is cheap. There's not much incentive to reduce the electricity consumption of a train.
Ridiculously so. Electricity for a Tesla or Rav4 for 100 miles is $1.25 to $2.5 dollars. Trains are actually really efficient from a raw technical prospective. They already use regenerative braking, and they are designed with big, efficient motors. Some electric motors can be up to 99.9 percent efficient. I have no idea how efficient train motors are, but I don't think trains have much room for improvement.
(I assume you mean electric cars?)
No. Gas cars and hybrids too. The negative externalities of a bus are huge, and can only be bigger than a car. They use more energy and do more damage to the roads. The negative externalities of a train are great because of the high costs of building the train line. If we got buses and trucks of the road or made them pay their fair share, cars would generate revenue.
There are some hybrid trains, if this becomes a problem, but I'd be surprised if it does: you may as well put a big battery near the railway line. (Or any other way of storing power.)
We could just as easily stick that battery in my car and get 40 miles of range. 40 miles + generator means 80 percent of all car trips are electric.
Then this all depends whether we're trying to make sprawl efficient, or make people efficient.
We're trying to give people what they voted for, sprawls, and make it efficient. In that light, a car is the best option.
I pay for some road maintenance, yet I hardly use them (95% of my on-road distance is by bicycle, which -- by the same damage formula -- doesn't need the expensive road), and I don't particularly care who pays -- that's easy to solve. Cars at the moment pay less than they should, at least within towns. The infrastructure cost to carry thousands of rail passengers (and freight) by road would be enormous.
Repeat after me, cars fund 80 percent of road expenditures. Transit fund 25 percent. If we got rid of buses and trucks, it would be fine. In essence, in order for cars to pay for roads and subsidise buses and trucks, we need an additional 17 cents a gallon gas tax. link. You'll have
Leaving so much space that you can't hear the cars is presumably increasing the length of your journey. I guess if everyone is in a car there's no one outside to hear the noise (except the people living near the main road).
Except I don't live near a main road, and I'm not all that far away from the road (about 40 feet from the road outside my house right now).
BTW, thanks for actually engaging in a civilized debate. That's kind of rare on these subjects, in my experience.
That link is hardly unbiased. The title is loaded, and the guy's clearly anti-public-transport (and anti walking and cycling).
That's an irrelevant point. Most of the other stuff out their is anti-car biased, so I guess we can ignore it for being biased, no? What matters is the validity of his arguments. All the data is a direct copy from a DOT report - linked in the article. You'll see that it is accurate and valid. If you disagree with the DOT, you'll have to find another source.
- he's comparing things like jet airlines to trams to electric scooters. These transport modes don't compete.
He's doing that deliberately so we can see all the transit modes at once. You are free to ignore any one you don't like.
- he's used the overall car energy consumption (highway + city + everything) and compared it with frequent-stopping rail. He hasn't included long distance rail or long distance buses/coaches, presumably because they're very efficient, and he hasn't included city driving, presumably because it's inefficient.
The city MPG of non-hybrid cars is not that much lower than the highway MPG, but that is a very valid criticism of this paper. However, that result is only a factor of twenty percent in the cases I looked at (comparing car's average and city MPG).
- in the related link, he compares imaginary cars from the future (weighing 100-200lb)
Those cars aren't imaginary. We can build one right now, it just won't be very safe. That's why he promotes robocars (which I have my own opinions about). What he's really talking about is an electric bike/motorcycle/trike, which is the most efficient method of motorised transport in the US, hands down. If you notice, he compares electric vehicles with Japanese light rail, and note that a solo Tesla (many small EV cars like the Rav4 have strikingly similar results) has similar efficiency. If you put the average number of people in that car, you get virtually the same exact number. The Japanese do only %50 of their miles in cars, the lowest in the G8, so I think they might know something about public transport.
- no externalities are considered. A bicycle in use produces no pollutants at all, a car does, trains produce the pollutants in a single place (at the power plant) where they can (if we want to) be collected. Cars take up lots of space (i.e. cause congestion), bicycles much less, trains even less. Cars need to be parked, eight bikes can use the same space, trains don't need to be parked where space is a premium (perhaps include the station building area here). Cars need a very smooth, high maintenance, wide road. Commuter trains need a medium maintenance narrow track, bicycles need a low-maintenance medium width path. Cars are noisy, trains quieter, bikes very quiet.
I'm currently working on a giant report that includes all the externalities, including noise, health, and route costs. The preliminary results are strikingly in favor of cars, unless you put a very big premium on CO2. We're talking very big, higher than most CO2 taxes.
Responding to criticism one by one:
A bicycle in use produces no pollutants at all - that's true, but their are health consequences to riding bicycles. I have not taken into account all the costs, but the cost of broken bones + knee damage are all issues we will be looking at.
trains produce the pollutants in a single place (at the power plant) - yep, and so do electric vehicles. They produce less pollutants as well because they are electric and more efficient by nature. They have a problem though, they run during the day, and I'm not sure if new powerplants need to be built to handle train demands. Going 70 percent electric would mean no new powerplants if we charge at night. You are totally right out the pollution of the internal combustion engine, and why it needs to go away.
Cars need to be parked, eight bikes can use the
What he meant by read a book was try to gain some nuanced understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps the best you can muster is the depth of a dictionary, but I still have faith that you can do better.
What deeper understanding do you want? This term has been so abused throughout the world to mean so many different things, that it is meaningless. First you have to pick one of the definitions of the term, to gain a deeper understanding. If you want to market your philosophy, you are more than welcome to do so, but I really, really encourage you to pick a different name, preferably one that does not include the word "socalism".
No. It blows away many lithium-ions by volumetric energy density. It blows away lithium-ions in cost per cycle*wHr, especially these flooded cells. It is much easier to use, safer, and more tolerant of abuse.
compared with 92 percent in the USA
Sorry. 98 percent.
In your "real" economic system, corporations wouldn't have to bribe and lobby their way out of things like being punished for ruining the environment, or exploiting workers, or fucking people over with loopholes in contracts, or by grabbing cash out of the bank vaults and fleeing the country. They'd just do it in broad daylight, without fear of consequences at all.
Umm, in my real economic system, the courts would actually make you pay for the consequences of environmental damage. Think about if BP had to pay for the spill for real. The problem is that BP and friends bribed the government to limit their liability to 500 million.
European public transport proves without a shadow of a doubt that it is progress. They use less than half the oil we do per capita. If you half ass investment in public transportation, it's a waste of money, just like if you started letting roads and bridges collapse, cars would stop being useful at a certain point.
No, it doesen't. The reason they use half as much oil as we do is because they drive 0.4 as much and have 0.6 times less fuel intense vehicles. This is not do to public transport as 85 percent of all ground trips are by car (compared with 92 percent in the USA). 0.4 * 0.6 = 0.24. Why do they use only half as much oil, then? If you'd looked at the previous link, you'd see how bad transit really is.
And why shouldn't your vehicle be taxed? Who's going to pay for roads? Do you live inside of a Disney cartoon?
Do you even read what I write? I not only said my vehicle should be taxed (as a user fee), I even said exactly how much my vehicle should be taxed for being a car. 3 US cents / mile. Now, how much should it be taxed for having a fossil fuelled internal combustion engine? That's a whole nother story.
FYI, this is due to the expansion of the visible universe projected out from what we can see. I.E., we see a galaxy 13 billion light years out moving away from us at near C, and now it is 46 billion light years away.
1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
When republicans allow corporations to have no-bid contracts, and to bribe legislators, these corporations in essence become part of the government. Socialism is coerced, but unequal sharing (see defs above). Therefore, when they allow corporations to take without paying back, they are performing coerced but unequal sharing. Also known as socialism.
Communist: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his need
Socialist: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his need, with a bit extra for the people we think produce more
Corporate socialist/aristocrat: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his connections
Capitalist: From each according to his desire, to each according to his capital
Bailout: From each according to his ablity, to each according to his lack thereof