If I eat oatmeal, cooked on my wood stove, for fuel calories, I get about 3000 mpg. Humans get about 600mpg if they could digest gasoline (think, vegetable or nut oil). Oats yield 5 calories of output for each 1 calorie of FF input (including fertilizer, harvest, processing). Cooking on wood stove avoids use of FF for cooking (significant, for a low-cal input like oats). Wood for wood stove comes from downed trees, all my cutting is with an electric chainsaw, splitting is with a hand-hydraulic splitter or hand-operated ax.
Cooking uses only a tiny fraction of the heat from the stove, and when the stove is in use, the heat from cooking the oatmeal is put to good use anyway.
An electric scooter, however, can probably do better than that. Humans are about 25% efficient; at 100% efficiency, that 600mpg would be 2400mpg. Call it 80% (Li battery charge/discharge, controller, motor), you get 1920mpg. From there, you have to plug in the FF costs for electrical generation and distribution, which can take that number up or down, depending on the source.
So on the one hand, yes, you could continue to drive a car if that really mattered to you, but if we needed that electricity for something else, we could use even less of it. Your cousin IS using a lot of electricity, it just happens that he has a low-FF source of electricity.
Ah yes, if you're not single-handedly solving the problem, clearly, you are a hypocrite. Some problems are large enough that they require large-scale, COERCIVE, solutions. Like taxes, a military draft, limits on how stinky or inefficient your car can be.
Of course, if someone actually does live a fully low-carbon lifestyle, then they're some kinda hippy weirdo, and their experience surely cannot generalize to "normal" people.
Wouldn't you like to show up to a job interview with a red Swingline stapler, and announce, "this is my stapler, I keep it because it doesn't bind up as much"?
Because if you got the job, you could be pretty sure that they were right-thinking people, and understood the importance of staplers that don't bind up.
But the statistics contradict your anecdote, and who cares what the blow-dried airheads on the "news" say? What matters to me is statistics, and the bigger the sample, the better.
France has the longer life expectancy (they do, 81.46 years vs US 78.49), so they must be doing something right in a really big way. This same pattern holds across multiple (49 other) countries, too; the simplest explanation is that we're doing something wrong in the US.
I don't want to seem uncaring about your family's particular medical problems, but it really does seem like the statistics win and your family just had terrible luck. It's hard to screw up statistics involving death -- it's not like we use different definitions in different places. I've poked at the numbers more than a little looking for alternate explanations (is it our crappy infant mortality rate that? No, that's not a large enough effect. Are we using different definitions of "infant mortality"? Sometimes, but it appears not to be a big difference -- expected biases in "miscarriage" do not appear.)
I think that there's a whole bunch of liberals who are trying to figure out which of the various evils presented to us is the least, and it's not an easy problem.
The various evils to consider (with wide uncertainty in exactly how evil they are): - population control - meaningful conservation - green energy - conventional nukes - breeder nukes - thorium breeder nukes - carbon capture The issue is not how things look in the lab or when practiced by some motivated 1%, but what happens if you scale them up to country-sized deployment. If nothing else, some of these will require a honking big up-front investment.
My impression is that the conservative answer is a combination of gas, oil, coal, and nukes, plus "population control" by limiting immigration, and that they are more certain of their answer.
And you can't tell the difference between addictive poison and a relatively harmless recreational drug? Nor you can tell the difference between jail for any use at all (not as bad as it used to be), and fines for smoking where other people can smell it (getting a little worse in a few places, but not many)?
Yeah, but if you do it that way, then you don't get to claim that both sides are equivalent. They're not. One is fuddled and useless, the other is batshit-crazy and dangerous.
Except that right now, the extreme right end is elected to Congress, and the extreme left end (in this country) is mostly in history books. Can you name a single Democratic Congressman who with politics similar to Hugo Chavez? Not "as reported by Fox News" or in the fevered imagination of that pill-popping-sex-tourist-draft-dodger with the radio show, but actually making speeches, or proposing legislation? There's nothing close. "Hard left" in this country is to propose a 70% marginal rate on very high incomes (not unheard of in our history, and not bad for the economy) and single-payer health care (like those radical leftists Canadians). "Close the carried-interest loophole", whoa, strong stuff.
Note that, since high marginal tax rates are part of our own history, and single-payer health care is just across our northern border, that promoting these things is in no way "to the exclusion of reality". They've been tried, and they work fine. Whereas, the right wing in this country proposes things that, if/when they are measured, are demonstrated not to work well (everything from abstinence-only sex education, to charter schools, to cutting government spending to "stimulate the economy"). The two "ends" in this country are in no way equivalent.
You seem to think that our government is uniquely incompetent, then. The rest of the OECD (except for Turkey and Mexico) manage with government-very-involved healthcare that is cheaper, delivers longer life expectancy, and lower infant mortality rates. What's different about our government that makes it unable to do this (as you assert)?
I think it has to be really long run; that we won't see adoption, until 20-40 years out.
Hydrogen economy seems like it has a bunch of hurdles to clear (we'll use a lot more energy to make it, not like we have a big pile of renewables deployed yet even for our current electric consumption), plus the cart-N-horse problem of distribution network and vehicles. The electric vehicles, dopey as they are in some ways, are actually paving the way for hydrogen because they put similar loads on the distribution network, and you'll want a well-developed motor and electric controls tech, plus you WILL want some battery/capacitor for regenerative braking.
Consider the competition; short run, natural gas is cheap, and we have more of a NG infrastructure already built. So that might delay a move to hydrogen. It might also delay a move to renewables for electric generation which is good and bad -- better than coal, but when it gets expensive (20 years?), most likely we'll be looking at unambiguous (and unpleasant) climate change, and we'll be crunched for electrical capacity. How crunched depends on how much we use EVs, versus how much we use NG.
The alternative is much smaller vehicles -- thus my mention of capacity and usual case. Smaller vehicles have smaller batteries; cheaper, easier to swap, faster to charge. People buy a lot more car than they need; in practice, most of the people I see on my commute home are one person per car with no apparent load of stuff. They could ride an electric scooter, and they might even get home faster that way (because the way I see most of them is on those days I bike and pass them all in a traffic jam). It's easy to add a medium-sized cargo capacity (6 grocery bags, e.g.) to a small vehicle without adding much weight -- this is done for bicycles already. A different future might have people not usually using cars, usually using small scooters and bikes, and renting something with capacity (or paying for delivery, or using a rental robot trailer that follows their scooter) when they really need to haul stuff.
Something eats algae, else we'd be drowning in it.
Hmmm. You guys ever investigate duckweed? Fresh water, though. Takes a really hard freeze to kill it. (Google says, maybe. "5x the starch per acre compared to corn". Lotsa quacks and hucskters. Could help with sewage and industrial farming waste.)
Do you mean, carbon sequestration accomplished by burying algae, rather than pressurized CO2? Sounds more plausible than keeping pressured gas in place.
I still think the genetic engineering plans are dubious. You'd damn sure not want a monoculture, for fear that something would evolve to eat "our" algae.
Well I'm gobsmacked. I was working from the Pimentel and Pimentel estimate that the total energy fixed by photosynthesis in the US is not as large as our current energy consumption; quick back-of-the-envelope from that suggests that running our cars on plants would take a mess of land. And I thought 5x was generous; corn's not perfect, but it puts a pretty good amount of its energy into fermentable sugar (and not that much into corn oil).
That research paper did contain what I consider a substantial disconnect -- even after discovering that local algal weeds were the best choice, they're still gung-ho for genetic engineering. Another difficulty I see is that they assume a source of waste CO2 -- that's better than not recycling the CO2 at all, but unless cars collect and store their own exhaust, it's only recycled once.
Cars win because of short-term concerns and high up-front costs. I can tell you that riding into Cambridge, MA at rush hour, a car is NOT faster, because I have raced my wife to the same location, and been indoors and sitting while she was still looking for parking. For the first cars, this was not true, but once everybody has a car, it is. (My father once had a 14-minute commute to work; he's long since retired, and the same trip now requires about an hour, even though the road has been doubled in width and several overpasses have been installed). But once you own the car, you've paid your ante, you'd feel pretty stupid just leaving it parked. Insurance is priced with a big constant and a tiny per-mile increment. Furthermore, all those cars on the road make it kinda unpleasant for cycling, and the traffic jams make mass transit even slower. Might as well drive.
The other interesting thing about a car (versus any sort of self-powered transport) is that it robs you of necessary exercise. How necessary? This study found that use of a bicycle to commute was associated 2-5 years of expected extra life. Those are not the limits; those are the averages, depending on gender and intensity of exercise, and as little as 3.5 hours/week of cycling. Do the math -- if your car is not a lot faster than your bicycle, it's possible for the extra time spent to ride a bike to work to pay off at a 4:1 ratio, even discounting time spent in the bathroom or asleep during those extra years.
Riding in 35F is not a problem; we've invented these things called "clothes" to help shield us from the cold. 20F and lower is fine, if you remember to wear clothes. Riding in 95F is less fun, but I've lived near Tampa and in Houston, and I happen to know that it is rarely 95F during the morning commute, and in both places yesterday the high temperature was well below that, in July, so you are at best exaggerating. When it actually is that hot a bike is an okay choice provided you back off on the speed a little bit. How do I know this? Because here near Boston, the high yesterday was 96F, and I rode a bicycle ten miles home from work, and I did not die, nor did I melt like the Wicked Witch. I did NOT try to set records on my way home.
Snow is fine (fun, even) on a bicycle, though the cars get more dangerous (I have studded tires, they usually don't. I have no windshield, theirs is usually fogged). Heavy rain is rare, but a relief in 95F weather. Dangerous hail is very rare but usually passes quickly; step under shelter, and wait a bit (in a car, you are much more often stuck in traffic, the socially acceptable reason for being randomly late). Note that (at least here in the US) you are probably equipped with a bicycle helmet, which provides some protection from the hail.
And I really do this stuff -- minimum twice a week, I ride a bike to work, 20 miles round trip, sooner or later in all weather (obviously, I try to avoid the wetter stuff, but mistakes get made). Backing off on the speed is the common strategy for not arriving in a puddle of sweat, and adequate clothing (roughly what you would use for cross-country skiing) is what you use for the really cold stuff. People make a big deal about "needing a shower at work", but realistically, if you ride that hard in that kind of heat on a regular basis, you wear the lycra kit, and just turn a hose on your head outdoors, take off your dripping kit in the bathroom, wring it out in the sink, and then put on regular clothes.
Scale, dammit, scale. Existing cornfields, if devoted entirely to ethanol production can only supply about 1/5 of our gasoline needs. Suppose charitably that algae is 5x as efficient per area. To get to 100%, you need as much land for algae growing as we currently devote to growing corn. That is a lot of land, whether it is existing valuable farmland or former nuclear bomb test ranges.
And how do we grow the algae? In ponds? What about evaporation and contamination? Where do we get water in a desert? In covered incubators or vats? That's a lot of covers to build, and how do we get rid of the waste heat? (there will be a lot of it)
The scale requirements for replacing fossil fuels with algae are just nuts, and plants are too inefficient at converting sunlight to energy. It's much, much easier to generate electricity and store it; the main hassle comes from demand that our energy storage also be lightweight (like a tank of gasoline) and/or quickly charged (like a tank of gasoline). In a more-electrical world, stuff that's smaller than cars (that has batteries so small that people will own multiple batteries, swap their own, and carry spares, and that can quickly charge on non-fancy electric feeds) will be cost and convenience competitive.
It would be most informative if you could list those plants. I have no doubt that they exist, but if they were overall that great, I would expect to see them used to make clothes, paper, and ropes. I am surely ignorant, but it was my impression that hemp was first-class for making rope, also makes durable and comfortable clothing (I own some, and it appears to be), and quite good for paper. Cotton is a known bad guy in cultivation (loads of water, among other things), and I believe it makes inferior rope. For clothing and paper, I was under the impression that linen (also flax) also scored well, but I don't know that flax was ever used for rope production on an industrial scale. Flax is also a source of linseed oil, which is darn useful stuff.
So, please repair my ignorance. What's better than hemp? In what ways is it better?
The ocean's a really hostile place for "civilized" stuff, and the desert is short on water. It's the scale that's a problem more than anything else. We also might want that desert for, say, photovoltaic panels instead. And notice also how nobody (as far as I have heard) has proposed floating solar plants; for some reason they like to put them in flat places not filled with energetic waves and loads of random life (barnacles that encrust boats, sharks that bite cables, that sort of thing). (Which is not to say that nothing lives in a desert, but the life seems to be much less troublemaking.)
Your car can theoretically run on algae fuel. In practice, it won't. Imagine replacing our cornfields, all of them, with fancy-schmancy algae incubators, and all the maintenance and labor that is going to require. We can get to about 20% of our current fuel consumption if we convert all of our corn to ethanol; if I give algae a 5x efficiency advantage, that's still all our cornfields. We can't grow it in open ponds, because there will be weeds that compete, birds that contaminate, never mind the loss of water to evaporation on that scale. Plants are not very efficient converters of solar energy -- today's photovoltaic kicks their ass.
Be careful, also to avoid confusing capacity with what you need for the usual case. My car is almost never driven anywhere near its 1-tank range in a single day, almost never carries more than one passenger (and often, just me), usually carries not much cargo, and never ever hits its top speed. On my commute home, it often travels miles at an average speed slower than a bicycle (I ride a bicycle on the same route, so I know the places where a bike beats traffic). On the bike I get to observe lots of commuters when I pass them, and my use of my car looks a lot like other people's use of their cars. And yeah, we're an urban/metro area, not Montana, but Metro Boston (*) alone has three times the population of Montana. (*) Not even "Greater Boston".
Headlights are far smaller than 100W with modern lighting technology, LEDs or otherwise. I expect the air conditioners in an electric car will be somewhat more effective because the engine itself is not barfing out enough waste heat to heat a house (*). The usual goal is to try to NOT vent that heat into the car itself, but it's hard not to have leakage, given that you're driving the car through the heat from the front, and the exhaust pipe and catalytic converter are routed underneath it. It's not like you have R-33 insulation between you and it.
(* comparison; we have an oil-fired furnace with a max burn rate of 1.1g/h; 33mph @ 30mpg is also 1.1g/h, and the fraction of useful work from burning gasoline in an ICE is about the same as the fraction of heat that goes up the stack from our aging furnace. And the furnace never runs constantly, even when asked to maintain a temperature 60 degrees warmer than what is outside.)
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Let's see, Fox News, plus a 2-year-old prediction that has been pretty well blown away by subsequent events. I very much suggest that you treat Fox News as the digital equivalent of used bird-cage liner. Studies (well, one study) show(s) that watching it makes you ignorant: http://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5
If I eat oatmeal, cooked on my wood stove, for fuel calories, I get about 3000 mpg. Humans get about 600mpg if they could digest gasoline (think, vegetable or nut oil). Oats yield 5 calories of output for each 1 calorie of FF input (including fertilizer, harvest, processing). Cooking on wood stove avoids use of FF for cooking (significant, for a low-cal input like oats). Wood for wood stove comes from downed trees, all my cutting is with an electric chainsaw, splitting is with a hand-hydraulic splitter or hand-operated ax.
Cooking uses only a tiny fraction of the heat from the stove, and when the stove is in use, the heat from cooking the oatmeal is put to good use anyway.
An electric scooter, however, can probably do better than that. Humans are about 25% efficient; at 100% efficiency, that 600mpg would be 2400mpg. Call it 80% (Li battery charge/discharge, controller, motor), you get 1920mpg. From there, you have to plug in the FF costs for electrical generation and distribution, which can take that number up or down, depending on the source.
So on the one hand, yes, you could continue to drive a car if that really mattered to you, but if we needed that electricity for something else, we could use even less of it. Your cousin IS using a lot of electricity, it just happens that he has a low-FF source of electricity.
Ah yes, if you're not single-handedly solving the problem, clearly, you are a hypocrite. Some problems are large enough that they require large-scale, COERCIVE, solutions. Like taxes, a military draft, limits on how stinky or inefficient your car can be.
Of course, if someone actually does live a fully low-carbon lifestyle, then they're some kinda hippy weirdo, and their experience surely cannot generalize to "normal" people.
I saw that, and thought, "have we drilled enough ice cores in enough places to know that the previous melts covered 97% of the ice cap?"
Wouldn't you like to show up to a job interview with a red Swingline stapler, and announce, "this is my stapler, I keep it because it doesn't bind up as much"?
Because if you got the job, you could be pretty sure that they were right-thinking people, and understood the importance of staplers that don't bind up.
But the statistics contradict your anecdote, and who cares what the blow-dried airheads on the "news" say? What matters to me is statistics, and the bigger the sample, the better.
France has the longer life expectancy (they do, 81.46 years vs US 78.49), so they must be doing something right in a really big way. This same pattern holds across multiple (49 other) countries, too; the simplest explanation is that we're doing something wrong in the US.
I don't want to seem uncaring about your family's particular medical problems, but it really does seem like the statistics win and your family just had terrible luck. It's hard to screw up statistics involving death -- it's not like we use different definitions in different places. I've poked at the numbers more than a little looking for alternate explanations (is it our crappy infant mortality rate that? No, that's not a large enough effect. Are we using different definitions of "infant mortality"? Sometimes, but it appears not to be a big difference -- expected biases in "miscarriage" do not appear.)
I think that there's a whole bunch of liberals who are trying to figure out which of the various evils presented to us is the least, and it's not an easy problem.
The various evils to consider (with wide uncertainty in exactly how evil they are):
- population control
- meaningful conservation
- green energy
- conventional nukes
- breeder nukes
- thorium breeder nukes
- carbon capture
The issue is not how things look in the lab or when practiced by some motivated 1%, but what happens if you scale them up to country-sized deployment. If nothing else, some of these will require a honking big up-front investment.
My impression is that the conservative answer is a combination of gas, oil, coal, and nukes, plus "population control" by limiting immigration, and that they are more certain of their answer.
And you can't tell the difference between addictive poison and a relatively harmless recreational drug? Nor you can tell the difference between jail for any use at all (not as bad as it used to be), and fines for smoking where other people can smell it (getting a little worse in a few places, but not many)?
Yeah, but if you do it that way, then you don't get to claim that both sides are equivalent. They're not. One is fuddled and useless, the other is batshit-crazy and dangerous.
Except that right now, the extreme right end is elected to Congress, and the extreme left end (in this country) is mostly in history books. Can you name a single Democratic Congressman who with politics similar to Hugo Chavez? Not "as reported by Fox News" or in the fevered imagination of that pill-popping-sex-tourist-draft-dodger with the radio show, but actually making speeches, or proposing legislation? There's nothing close. "Hard left" in this country is to propose a 70% marginal rate on very high incomes (not unheard of in our history, and not bad for the economy) and single-payer health care (like those radical leftists Canadians). "Close the carried-interest loophole", whoa, strong stuff.
Note that, since high marginal tax rates are part of our own history, and single-payer health care is just across our northern border, that promoting these things is in no way "to the exclusion of reality". They've been tried, and they work fine. Whereas, the right wing in this country proposes things that, if/when they are measured, are demonstrated not to work well (everything from abstinence-only sex education, to charter schools, to cutting government spending to "stimulate the economy"). The two "ends" in this country are in no way equivalent.
You seem to think that our government is uniquely incompetent, then. The rest of the OECD (except for Turkey and Mexico) manage with government-very-involved healthcare that is cheaper, delivers longer life expectancy, and lower infant mortality rates. What's different about our government that makes it unable to do this (as you assert)?
Spoken like someone who has never milked a cow.
And did you want healthy drinkable milk, or merely something white and wet?
I think it has to be really long run; that we won't see adoption, until 20-40 years out.
Hydrogen economy seems like it has a bunch of hurdles to clear (we'll use a lot more energy to make it, not like we have a big pile of renewables deployed yet even for our current electric consumption), plus the cart-N-horse problem of distribution network and vehicles. The electric vehicles, dopey as they are in some ways, are actually paving the way for hydrogen because they put similar loads on the distribution network, and you'll want a well-developed motor and electric controls tech, plus you WILL want some battery/capacitor for regenerative braking.
Consider the competition; short run, natural gas is cheap, and we have more of a NG infrastructure already built. So that might delay a move to hydrogen. It might also delay a move to renewables for electric generation which is good and bad -- better than coal, but when it gets expensive (20 years?), most likely we'll be looking at unambiguous (and unpleasant) climate change, and we'll be crunched for electrical capacity. How crunched depends on how much we use EVs, versus how much we use NG.
The alternative is much smaller vehicles -- thus my mention of capacity and usual case. Smaller vehicles have smaller batteries; cheaper, easier to swap, faster to charge. People buy a lot more car than they need; in practice, most of the people I see on my commute home are one person per car with no apparent load of stuff. They could ride an electric scooter, and they might even get home faster that way (because the way I see most of them is on those days I bike and pass them all in a traffic jam). It's easy to add a medium-sized cargo capacity (6 grocery bags, e.g.) to a small vehicle without adding much weight -- this is done for bicycles already. A different future might have people not usually using cars, usually using small scooters and bikes, and renting something with capacity (or paying for delivery, or using a rental robot trailer that follows their scooter) when they really need to haul stuff.
Something eats algae, else we'd be drowning in it.
Hmmm. You guys ever investigate duckweed? Fresh water, though. Takes a really hard freeze to kill it.
(Google says, maybe. "5x the starch per acre compared to corn". Lotsa quacks and hucskters. Could help with sewage and industrial farming waste.)
Do you mean, carbon sequestration accomplished by burying algae, rather than pressurized CO2? Sounds more plausible than keeping pressured gas in place.
I still think the genetic engineering plans are dubious. You'd damn sure not want a monoculture, for fear that something would evolve to eat "our" algae.
Well I'm gobsmacked. I was working from the Pimentel and Pimentel estimate that the total energy fixed by photosynthesis in the US is not as large as our current energy consumption; quick back-of-the-envelope from that suggests that running our cars on plants would take a mess of land. And I thought 5x was generous; corn's not perfect, but it puts a pretty good amount of its energy into fermentable sugar (and not that much into corn oil).
That research paper did contain what I consider a substantial disconnect -- even after discovering that local algal weeds were the best choice, they're still gung-ho for genetic engineering. Another difficulty I see is that they assume a source of waste CO2 -- that's better than not recycling the CO2 at all, but unless cars collect and store their own exhaust, it's only recycled once.
Cars win because of short-term concerns and high up-front costs. I can tell you that riding into Cambridge, MA at rush hour, a car is NOT faster, because I have raced my wife to the same location, and been indoors and sitting while she was still looking for parking. For the first cars, this was not true, but once everybody has a car, it is. (My father once had a 14-minute commute to work; he's long since retired, and the same trip now requires about an hour, even though the road has been doubled in width and several overpasses have been installed). But once you own the car, you've paid your ante, you'd feel pretty stupid just leaving it parked. Insurance is priced with a big constant and a tiny per-mile increment. Furthermore, all those cars on the road make it kinda unpleasant for cycling, and the traffic jams make mass transit even slower. Might as well drive.
The other interesting thing about a car (versus any sort of self-powered transport) is that it robs you of necessary exercise. How necessary? This study found that use of a bicycle to commute was associated 2-5 years of expected extra life. Those are not the limits; those are the averages, depending on gender and intensity of exercise, and as little as 3.5 hours/week of cycling. Do the math -- if your car is not a lot faster than your bicycle, it's possible for the extra time spent to ride a bike to work to pay off at a 4:1 ratio, even discounting time spent in the bathroom or asleep during those extra years.
Riding in 35F is not a problem; we've invented these things called "clothes" to help shield us from the cold. 20F and lower is fine, if you remember to wear clothes. Riding in 95F is less fun, but I've lived near Tampa and in Houston, and I happen to know that it is rarely 95F during the morning commute, and in both places yesterday the high temperature was well below that, in July, so you are at best exaggerating. When it actually is that hot a bike is an okay choice provided you back off on the speed a little bit. How do I know this? Because here near Boston, the high yesterday was 96F, and I rode a bicycle ten miles home from work, and I did not die, nor did I melt like the Wicked Witch. I did NOT try to set records on my way home.
Snow is fine (fun, even) on a bicycle, though the cars get more dangerous (I have studded tires, they usually don't. I have no windshield, theirs is usually fogged). Heavy rain is rare, but a relief in 95F weather. Dangerous hail is very rare but usually passes quickly; step under shelter, and wait a bit (in a car, you are much more often stuck in traffic, the socially acceptable reason for being randomly late). Note that (at least here in the US) you are probably equipped with a bicycle helmet, which provides some protection from the hail.
And I really do this stuff -- minimum twice a week, I ride a bike to work, 20 miles round trip, sooner or later in all weather (obviously, I try to avoid the wetter stuff, but mistakes get made). Backing off on the speed is the common strategy for not arriving in a puddle of sweat, and adequate clothing (roughly what you would use for cross-country skiing) is what you use for the really cold stuff. People make a big deal about "needing a shower at work", but realistically, if you ride that hard in that kind of heat on a regular basis, you wear the lycra kit, and just turn a hose on your head outdoors, take off your dripping kit in the bathroom, wring it out in the sink, and then put on regular clothes.
Scale, dammit, scale. Existing cornfields, if devoted entirely to ethanol production can only supply about 1/5 of our gasoline needs. Suppose charitably that algae is 5x as efficient per area. To get to 100%, you need as much land for algae growing as we currently devote to growing corn. That is a lot of land, whether it is existing valuable farmland or former nuclear bomb test ranges.
And how do we grow the algae? In ponds? What about evaporation and contamination? Where do we get water in a desert? In covered incubators or vats? That's a lot of covers to build, and how do we get rid of the waste heat? (there will be a lot of it)
The scale requirements for replacing fossil fuels with algae are just nuts, and plants are too inefficient at converting sunlight to energy. It's much, much easier to generate electricity and store it; the main hassle comes from demand that our energy storage also be lightweight (like a tank of gasoline) and/or quickly charged (like a tank of gasoline). In a more-electrical world, stuff that's smaller than cars (that has batteries so small that people will own multiple batteries, swap their own, and carry spares, and that can quickly charge on non-fancy electric feeds) will be cost and convenience competitive.
It would be most informative if you could list those plants. I have no doubt that they exist, but if they were overall that great, I would expect to see them used to make clothes, paper, and ropes. I am surely ignorant, but it was my impression that hemp was first-class for making rope, also makes durable and comfortable clothing (I own some, and it appears to be), and quite good for paper. Cotton is a known bad guy in cultivation (loads of water, among other things), and I believe it makes inferior rope. For clothing and paper, I was under the impression that linen (also flax) also scored well, but I don't know that flax was ever used for rope production on an industrial scale. Flax is also a source of linseed oil, which is darn useful stuff.
So, please repair my ignorance. What's better than hemp? In what ways is it better?
The ocean's a really hostile place for "civilized" stuff, and the desert is short on water.
It's the scale that's a problem more than anything else.
We also might want that desert for, say, photovoltaic panels instead.
And notice also how nobody (as far as I have heard) has proposed floating solar plants; for some reason they like to put them in flat places not filled with energetic waves and loads of random life (barnacles that encrust boats, sharks that bite cables, that sort of thing). (Which is not to say that nothing lives in a desert, but the life seems to be much less troublemaking.)
Your car can theoretically run on algae fuel. In practice, it won't. Imagine replacing our cornfields, all of them, with fancy-schmancy algae incubators, and all the maintenance and labor that is going to require. We can get to about 20% of our current fuel consumption if we convert all of our corn to ethanol; if I give algae a 5x efficiency advantage, that's still all our cornfields. We can't grow it in open ponds, because there will be weeds that compete, birds that contaminate, never mind the loss of water to evaporation on that scale. Plants are not very efficient converters of solar energy -- today's photovoltaic kicks their ass.
Be careful, also to avoid confusing capacity with what you need for the usual case. My car is almost never driven anywhere near its 1-tank range in a single day, almost never carries more than one passenger (and often, just me), usually carries not much cargo, and never ever hits its top speed. On my commute home, it often travels miles at an average speed slower than a bicycle (I ride a bicycle on the same route, so I know the places where a bike beats traffic). On the bike I get to observe lots of commuters when I pass them, and my use of my car looks a lot like other people's use of their cars. And yeah, we're an urban/metro area, not Montana, but Metro Boston (*) alone has three times the population of Montana. (*) Not even "Greater Boston".
Headlights are far smaller than 100W with modern lighting technology, LEDs or otherwise. I expect the air conditioners in an electric car will be somewhat more effective because the engine itself is not barfing out enough waste heat to heat a house (*). The usual goal is to try to NOT vent that heat into the car itself, but it's hard not to have leakage, given that you're driving the car through the heat from the front, and the exhaust pipe and catalytic converter are routed underneath it. It's not like you have R-33 insulation between you and it.
(* comparison; we have an oil-fired furnace with a max burn rate of 1.1g/h; 33mph @ 30mpg is also 1.1g/h, and the fraction of useful work from burning gasoline in an ICE is about the same as the fraction of heat that goes up the stack from our aging furnace. And the furnace never runs constantly, even when asked to maintain a temperature 60 degrees warmer than what is outside.)
Would this be true in Greensboro, North Carolina? No idea what the French law is, but "anywhere in the world" includes lots of places.
Is this French law you are quoting? Napoleonic Code and English Common Law are different beasts.