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U-Know! Forum » Who Killed The Electric Car? |
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morfe 2992 posts |
Jun 05, 2006, 19:55
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Anyone seen it yet? http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Jun 05, 2006, 20:09
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Not seen it yet. But the electric car - like the hydrogen powered car - is merely rearranging deckchairs on a sinking ship. The electricity powering that car has to be generated somehow. And automobile construction ain't exactly a carbon-neutral endeavour, whatever they run on.
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Hob 4033 posts |
Jun 05, 2006, 22:48
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>rearranging deckchairs on a sinking ship Effective analogy that. Is there no hope of rearranging them into a shape capable of acting like a liferaft? I know solving the car fuel problem won't directly address the issue of energy needed for manufacturing, but wouldn't it be feasible that if a plant based fuel engine could be developed for cars, then sooner or later, some bright spark could scale it up to work in power stations? The cynic in me assumes that's all too pie-in-the-sky, but hope springs eternal and all that... http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-24-2006/0004368121&EDATE= That Sundance thingy looks an interesting bit of film. Thanks for the tip Mr Morfe.
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Jun 05, 2006, 23:42
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The question with plant based fuels is where do you grow them? We have 6bn people on earth, and another million joining us every 5 days. There'll be 10bn by the middle of the century. To feed these people more wild land will go under the plough. If we were to try to supply fuel for hundreds of millions of vehicles too, we would literally run out of land. George Monbiot's covered it in an accessible, concise yet authoritativve and referenced way: "The most productive oil crop which can be grown in this country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of biodiesel. So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel. To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom. Switching to green fuels requires four and half times our arable area. Even the EU’s more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all our cropland." http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/ So we go to more productive plants that grow in hotter regions with sufficient rainfall; ethanol from sugar, or palm oil. These mean great deforestation in Brazil for the former, and Malaysia, Indonesia and Pacific islands. I fear that we will make fuel oil the next great cash crop, and poor nations will go hungry while we continue to drive round expending the energy it takes to carry a ton of metal with us wherever we go. Monbiot again: "In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impacts of palm oil production. “Between 1985 and 2000,” it found, “the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia”. In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest has been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares is scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5m in Indonesia. Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field. Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are now moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they’ve cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria." http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/06/worse-than-fossil-fuel/ The link you give talks of using plant fuels (problems as already described), fossil fuels (problems I don't need to mention), or hydrogen. Hydrogen is currently mostly derived from natural gas; it's another fossil fuel. It is possible to extract it from sustainable sources like water, but it takes a tremendous quantity of energy to do so, far more than you get from burning the resulting hydrogen. And that's before you deal with the power needed to compress and distribute it. It's rather like having a battery-making machine that needs two batteries as power for every one it produces. Finding more efficient uses of fuel (such as hybroids) or ways to use avaialble sources such as waste vegetable oil are laudable and buy us some time to power down a bit more gently. But that has to be their aim. There is no way that we can continue our high-travel lifestyles on anything other than fossil fuels. We have to wean ourselves off them.
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Jun 06, 2006, 01:08
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"Effective analogy that. Is there no hope of rearranging them into a shape capable of acting like a liferaft?" To stretch this analogy, there is no liferaft that can carry all the passengers safely. There's only raft space for a few people and their supplies. And the longer they go on, the less rations there'll be and they'll start squabbling among themselves. Better to pull into a port where all the passengers can disembark safely.
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TheBear 981 posts |
Jun 06, 2006, 10:52
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Hey that looks good. I'll definitely go and see that.
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Kid Calamity 9045 posts |
Jun 06, 2006, 12:33
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Yeah.
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moss 2897 posts |
Jun 07, 2006, 12:26
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Another history of the car.. http://www.resurgence.org/2005/simms232.htm
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morfe 2992 posts |
Jun 07, 2006, 19:29
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"Freudians have a term for how people invest emotion into inanimate objects." Funnily, the last time I invested any emotion whatsoever towards our car was the time when it was very, pointedly, 'inanimate'. Great read tho, thanks. I'm still the disgruntled cyclist, but 'have' to drive sometimes, as do many.
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Hob 4033 posts |
Jun 07, 2006, 22:56
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Ta for the Monbiot links, most interesting. I'm especially intrigued by the bit about how many yearsworth of photosynthesis get burned up each day. Thinking of all those molecular bonds and how long it took to trap the sunlight really brought home how all the energy we as a species expend, must come ultimately from the sun. It got me wondering about possible methods of generating substrate for fuel cells using microbes or nanotech or whatever, and a bit of looking about the internet showed that it's a long way off, with no-one seeming to be looking beyond the opportunity to make a fast buck. It seems fuel cells, bio-diesel, biomass pellets, electric microbes, even chocolate eating, ethanol producing bacteria are all areas of growing investment. But I'd still like to have some optimism. Maybe attempts to get people to share information will result in lots of different way to make small amounts of sustainable energy, which, when coupled with reduced energy demand, via better design, could result in humans finding one of those safe ports before the ship sinks?
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