Tag: electric cars

Will the Internal Combustion Engine be Outlawed by 2035 and What Would be the Results?

photog Current Events, Fake Science , , ,

Mandating battery driven automobiles would be an enormous change to the world we live in.  It would, in one fell swoop, destroy enormous corporations like Exxon and British Petroleum.  It would require the extraction of tremendous quantities of minerals such as lithium and nickel from the ground with devastating impact on the environment that is allegedly the reason for the change.  It would require us to sacrifice the almost limitless mobility we currently enjoy for a greatly diminished horizon.  And it would require an enormous upgrade in the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure.  And hidden in the switch is a higher level of control on your access to energy.

I posed this as a question.  But what it boils down to is a simpler question.  Are the Millennials and Generation Z so docile and bought into the Climate Change argument that they’ll just go along with this change.  My personal experience with these people says the answer is yes.  They are a completely different animal from their parents and grandparents.  They are easily led into actions that are painted as socially virtuous.  They do not possess any instincts to question authority.  And they like to move with the herd they identify with.  Put simply they’re domesticated animals, let’s say sheep.  And this is a generalization that of course has millions of exceptions but as a reflection of the majority of this cohort it is accurate.

This being the case I’ve been thinking about whether there is some combination of actions or events that could change this result.  The only thing I could think of is if some states band together and resist this mandate and because of this make owning battery driven cars unattractive.  For instance, suppose that the west coast states mandate battery cars but the rest of the west refuses.  That would mean that people in the gas vehicle areas would continue to have enormous freedom to travel where they wish but the coastal state people wouldn’t have that advantage.  I guess they could rent gas vehicles at the borders of their state and use these cars to travel for business or vacation.  And even this would reinforce for these people just how pathetic battery cars are in comparison.  In the east, with the smaller size of the states, gas vehicles could quite often pass right through a battery only state without running out of gas.  For instance, let’s say that Illinois was a battery state.  Someone in Indiana could drive right through Illinois and reach Iowa or Missouri without running out of gas.

So, the west coast, the Great Lakes and the northeast would become dead zones for gas cars and enclaves for battery cars.  And the enclaves would put up restrictive laws.  They would restrict or forbid gas cars from entering their territory, much in the way they restrict gun transport.  Maybe the gas car states would retaliate to punish the battery car states with similar bans.  That might be an interesting way to start driving wedges between the red and blue states.

But the funny part of all this is that freight hauling trucks would probably still be running on fuel.  Specifically, diesel fuel but probably there won’t be any battery-powered 18-wheelers.  Will these battery car states dispense with trucks?  Will they start building railway spurs everywhere and use only electrified tracks?  I guess it’s possible.  But what’s more likely is that they’ll leave diesel trucks as an anomaly, since private citizens won’t be able to have diesel powered cars.  After all inconsistency isn’t a problem for them.  It’s a feature of a quasi-religious approach to life.

Now, this is all spit-balling.  But you can see that this push to eliminate gas powered cars could have unexpected results.  And even if the whole country goes along with it, there could be strong reactions to the problems of mandating an inferior technology over an existing superior one.  Eliminating gas cars might have the outcome of making hydrogen fueled cars suddenly attractive.  These aren’t as convenient as gas cars but they eliminate the refueling time problem inherent in the battery cars.  Trade-offs will be weighed and people will gravitate to what makes their lives easier.  Even the sheep will choose between the bad options they’ve accepted to minimize the pain they have to endure.

I love the freedom that modern automobiles give us.  Being able to pack my bags and drive five hundred miles and go camping or attend an event has become a feature of American life.  The fact that the young would let this go to “save Gaia” is extremely depressing in my mind.  But I think it’s accurate.  Once again, we will witness soon whether the American dream will be sacrificed by our descendants or whether the will to resist still exists.

Figuring Out the Future

photog Current Events, Fake Science , , ,

I was reading a post on the ZMan’s site about electric cars.  His thesis is that electric cars are a policy in search of a reason.  And of course, he’s correct.  Electric cars are inferior in all aspects including energy efficiency and even “carbon footprint.”  After all, the power that charges the battery is still being generated by burning fossil fuels.  And since transmitting electricity wastes between thirty and forty percent of the energy as heat then just burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine (ICE) burns much less fuel.  But what electric cars effectively do is give direct control over transportation to the government.  Now instead of allowing car companies and fuel companies to sell their products directly to consumers, the government can regulate where and how you access the energy needed to run your vehicle.  And they can even tell when you recharge your car and eventually, they’ll be able to tell you when you can’t.  It’s pretty obvious where all this is going.  The freedom we have had to be able to get up and go wherever we want whenever we want is about to go away.  The powers that be have a plan for the future and it doesn’t include that particular freedom, at least not for most of us.

But I don’t think we should assume that is the only change that is in the works.  The global warming nonsense is the justification for a whole host of changes that are coming down the pike.  As with all things bad and dysfunctional the place to look for what will be rolled out is California.  Rolling brown outs, rolling black outs, water restrictions and the scheduled elimination of the internal combustion engine is already in place there.  Probably coming down the road will be the elimination of fossil fuels for home heating, the replacement of flush toilets with chemical systems and restrictions on the use of refrigeration and air conditioning.  After that, restrictions on the kind of produce farmers are allowed to grow will be decreed based on the amount of water and fertilizer required.

All of this sounds pretty bleak.  And it is.  We have lived in a time of such prosperity and freedom that these types of restrictions sound awful.  But they are based on a logic that can be guessed at.  Up until the twentieth century Malthusianism held that eventually population growth would outstrip the food supply and a crisis would lead to a population die off.  In addition, most people believe that the supply of fossil fuels is finite and possibly near its end.  The people who run our country are unhappy with the fracking and other enhanced petroleum recovery techniques currently going on.  They would prefer that the Middle Eastern and Russian resources were utilized instead.  And now that birth control has proven capable of reducing the birth rate below replacement levels in much of the developed world, I think they’ve formulated a plan on how to reshape society.  In a nutshell they are telling our children to drop dead.  And the strange thing is a lot of them are agreeing to the idea.

I’ve mentioned a discussion I had with a co-worker a few years back where he almost bragged to me that he had decided to forego having a family to help save the planet.  As an extenuating circumstance, I will admit that based on appearance and personality, I didn’t think his decision was the only factor that might prevent him from convincing a woman to bear his children.  But the fact that he had allowed this Gaia argument to have any weight at all in his personal reproductive decision-making process was thought provoking on my part.

What all this tells me is that we are no longer convenient as herd animals for our lords and masters.  They don’t need as many of us and they don’t want to pay as much for our upkeep as they used to tolerate.  What we got used to as first-world conditions are no longer seen as acceptable.  We’re going to have to live a little lower.

Of course, the alternative that we used to expect is for engineers and scientists to discover and commercialize processes that allow for Americans to improve their lifestyle not degrade it.  Energy production and personal transportation are things that have made this country wealthy and free in ways that no other country in history ever was.  Looking for ways to fuel our cars and heat and cool our homes are not insurmountable technical problems.  There are any number of existing resources that can be adapted to the present needs and even improve on the performance and efficiency of our present arrangements.  Nuclear power, will be the engine that will make it possible to produce affordable fuel after petroleum is exhausted.  It is probable that an important part of that fuel requirement will be the use of hydrogen combustion to heat our homes.  This will require the perfection of extremely fail-safe methods of storing and burning hydrogen.  But when that is achieved, we will have a fuel that produces only water as its exhaust material.  As far as the use of hydrogen as a fuel for cars, that is a trickier problem.  It may not be feasible to make a collision between hydrogen fueled cars safe.  It may be necessary for synthetic hydrocarbons to be produced at industrial scale in order to allow our cars to be fueled safely but with enough energy the existing art in chemical engineering is well able to achieve this result.

Another problem that cheap energy will solve is the shortage of potable water.  Currently reverse osmosis has been perfected such that sea water can be converted into fresh water.  But the high-pressure pumping costs used in this process are considerable.  What is needed is the output of several very large nuclear power plants located in Southern California to produce enough water for the household requirements of California.  This would then free up the water of the Colorado River to be used by the remaining southwestern states.

But what all this requires first is for us to escape from our elite masters.  They do not add anything to the equation and the sooner we stop living according to their dictates the sooner we’ll begin making a better world.  We’re not their serfs and we don’t have to disappear just to suit their tastes.  Maybe they need to disappear.  If they’re not careful they just might.