cracked_ribs
Well-Known Member
Personally I'm extremely skeptical about the role of electric cars. The odds of being able to produce them on the scale necessary to offset conventional auto emissions seem remote to me; on top of that there are a lot of questions relating to energy supply to recharge an actual fleet of energy vehicles similar in size to the existing fleet of gas vehicles.
Fossil fuels have value because of their extreme energy density; they're basically the most dense storage medium for solar energy we've found. That's going to be tough to replace and the demand is going to increase radically as the Chinese and Indian middle classes develop. Maybe a nuclear grid might power electric cars; but then the mining and manufacturing operations necessary to support a global supply chain of batteries for those cars might be an environmental nightmare in its own right.
At present, market cap per vehicle produced by Tesla is around 600,000 USD. Compare that to Ford or GM which are in the $10,000/vehicle range...if Tesla didn't get a steady supply of investment dollars from government and private sources, they'd be broke in a matter of weeks. Very risky and someone's going to get left holding the bag there.
Not particularly a fan of the fossil fuel game myself as I am a believer in the climate change models, and we can't replace any fossil fuels we burn so every drop is a drop we won't get back, but I also believe that there are a lot of pie-in-the-sky theories about how we can just switch to alternative energy, and how if we just invested in that "as a society" we'd get great results.
Well, societies don't invest. Individuals invest capital in ideas, typically when they look like money-makers. If private firms aren't pouring money into alternative energy options, that's because whatever upsides they may have, they aren't as efficient as fossil fuel options. That's not to say we won't be forced ultimately to use less efficient energy storage media, to store energy harvested now and not just burn a 60 million year old pre-enriched reserve...but it will cost more, and we'll get less out. It might still be worth doing, but that's the reality.
Sadly...whatever Canada does in terms of restricting our usage has basically no effect on the global climate, and may have negative consequences for us.
The Earth is, in a lot of ways, like a giant shared home, and we have a large room with a candle in it. On the other side of the house, there's another large room with 10 Chinese students, burning lanterns and heaters and stoves. We can definitely switch to a smaller candle, but then the question is: how does this affect our relative ability to control the household decision-making? If the 10 Chinese students burn fuel like crazy in an effort to expand their knowledge of household systems, are we hamstringing ourselves by trying to cut the household fuel bill by a fraction?
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do it...but remember that if, as David Suzuki once said, we're all on a bus together that's going to drive off a cliff if nobody does anything, it might be best if we all stuck our feet out and tried to slow it down. That was his solution, anyway.
I'm more the type to strategize on how to win the fight for the driver's seat so that we can stop the bus without everyone's legs getting broken, myself...but hey, I don't get government money. My solutions actually have to be efficient. I wouldn't discourage anyone who wants to stick their limbs out of a speeding bus, of course - I'm a big believer in individual freedoms.
Not super fired up on people who insist that the only solution is for ME to stick my limbs out of a speeding bus, however.
Fossil fuels have value because of their extreme energy density; they're basically the most dense storage medium for solar energy we've found. That's going to be tough to replace and the demand is going to increase radically as the Chinese and Indian middle classes develop. Maybe a nuclear grid might power electric cars; but then the mining and manufacturing operations necessary to support a global supply chain of batteries for those cars might be an environmental nightmare in its own right.
At present, market cap per vehicle produced by Tesla is around 600,000 USD. Compare that to Ford or GM which are in the $10,000/vehicle range...if Tesla didn't get a steady supply of investment dollars from government and private sources, they'd be broke in a matter of weeks. Very risky and someone's going to get left holding the bag there.
Not particularly a fan of the fossil fuel game myself as I am a believer in the climate change models, and we can't replace any fossil fuels we burn so every drop is a drop we won't get back, but I also believe that there are a lot of pie-in-the-sky theories about how we can just switch to alternative energy, and how if we just invested in that "as a society" we'd get great results.
Well, societies don't invest. Individuals invest capital in ideas, typically when they look like money-makers. If private firms aren't pouring money into alternative energy options, that's because whatever upsides they may have, they aren't as efficient as fossil fuel options. That's not to say we won't be forced ultimately to use less efficient energy storage media, to store energy harvested now and not just burn a 60 million year old pre-enriched reserve...but it will cost more, and we'll get less out. It might still be worth doing, but that's the reality.
Sadly...whatever Canada does in terms of restricting our usage has basically no effect on the global climate, and may have negative consequences for us.
The Earth is, in a lot of ways, like a giant shared home, and we have a large room with a candle in it. On the other side of the house, there's another large room with 10 Chinese students, burning lanterns and heaters and stoves. We can definitely switch to a smaller candle, but then the question is: how does this affect our relative ability to control the household decision-making? If the 10 Chinese students burn fuel like crazy in an effort to expand their knowledge of household systems, are we hamstringing ourselves by trying to cut the household fuel bill by a fraction?
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do it...but remember that if, as David Suzuki once said, we're all on a bus together that's going to drive off a cliff if nobody does anything, it might be best if we all stuck our feet out and tried to slow it down. That was his solution, anyway.
I'm more the type to strategize on how to win the fight for the driver's seat so that we can stop the bus without everyone's legs getting broken, myself...but hey, I don't get government money. My solutions actually have to be efficient. I wouldn't discourage anyone who wants to stick their limbs out of a speeding bus, of course - I'm a big believer in individual freedoms.
Not super fired up on people who insist that the only solution is for ME to stick my limbs out of a speeding bus, however.