Wired had an article a while back, Why the clean tech boom went bust. It explained a lot of the problems with the green industry but the comments were a great example of the left’s war on science.
Thank for the link, Wodun. The comments were quite interesting. The greens still believe that oil and gas is being subsidized just like the alternative energy industry. Their poor economic sense can’t differentiate between actual subsidy where the government doles out tax dollars, and tax incentives where companies use their own money to take advantage of a reduced tax rate. These people are still all about zero-sum economics with government as the provider of wealth.
Perhaps you could have them look for this mysterious subsidy. The US uses 19.2 million barrels of oil per day. If the true cost was $200 a barrel and subsidies are cutting that to $100 a barrel, there should be a $700 billion dollar line item in the federal budget somewhere, which is larger than all defense spending. To pay for it, the half of Americans who pay income tax should be shellng out $4,600 each, or perhaps $5,000 to cover the overhead in keeping such a massive program absolutely secret, to where Wikileaks can’t even sniff up a mention of it.
Future vehicles should burn Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) with possibly a liquid (Gasoline / Methanol / Ethanol) storage as a backup. No special (unknown) carburetion or injection is needed to burn CNG, so it can be the fuel of the future, as the US has enough Natural Gas to power ALL land vehicles. CNG is superior to GME in engine wear. We would still need liquid fuels for airplanes, boats, lawnmowers, etc., after the transition, however.
Bob Zubrin proposes the Multifuel (GME) approach, but for local delivery vehicles CNG should be used. Every town over some reasonable number (say 30,000) should have a CNG station for its fleet, and other local delivery users, such as the US Postal Service, Fed Ex, UPS, etc., could also tap into such a station. The present Honda CNG Civic with a GME liquid backup would be perfect right now, given a reasonable price. And every service station could slowly change to CNG, as they did from leaded to unleaded gasoline, once the demand kicks in. CNG is the superior “battery” technology.
CNG is certainly a viable options for most cars but I’m not so certain about for diesel engines such as in heavy trucks. Would you have to replace the diesel engine or is it possible to convert a diesel for CNG?
For diesels I’d convert either coal or natural gas to dimethyl ether (DME), which is non-toxic and a direct replacement for propane. It also has a cetane number that’s better than diesel fuel. The only required modifications are for extra oil lubrication around the valves, since some diesel engines used the fuel itself as a lubricant. The Chinese have already converted lots of buses to run on DME.
Larry and George – your points on diesel conversions are correct. For big cross-country trucks, CNG tank size might be impractical. Using CNG should reduce both gasoline and diesel prices to help eliminate foreign oil blackmail. If the government should mandate anything, local CNG usage would be best.
There’s another consideration – I’ve seen many places where they won’t allow any vehicle with pressurized gas cylinders to use tunnels. I know they’re mostly talking about things like campers and RVs but it’s still a consideration in some places. I’ve heard of terrible explosions in the relatively confined space of a tunnel. This seems less likely an issue for cars designed to use CNG because they’d have the structure to protect the tank. However, for retrofit conversions, it’d be harder to add that kind of protection. This is only an issue in relatively few places but that could be an issue for big trucks.
I think part of the left’s fascination may stem from thinking that electricity comes from a plug in the wall, much like the way milk comes from a grocery store.
Unless the US electric grid goes nuclear, battery powered cars would increase CO2 emissions. The few on the left that realize this and still push for electric cars are probably just viewing it as an interim step until the DOE develops rainbow powered ponies.
I think another part is an “oil is icky” emotional response. It’s black and smelly, it kills birds, it needs to be “cleaned up”, smokestacks, etc. It’s an easy sell.
We have a local commuter train which is diesel–it’d be nice for several reasons to electrify it, but the cost so far has proven prohibitive. Lots of money for proposals for high speed rail from nowhere to nowhere, though, just so long as it doesn’t go close to somewhere on the way.
If you want to kill birds, put up a modern windmill. If you want to waste government money, put in light rail. Bicycle paths isolated from cars are nice but have no funding mechanism. Going back to the 1890’s sounds great to environmentalists / city planners, but it never works.
Back in the 1890s, major cities had a serious problem disposing of the tons of horse manure dropped on the streets every day. Today, that problem is concentrated at City Hall.
If you want to kill birds, put up a modern windmill.
About 70 golden eagles are killed every year by turbines at California’s Altamont Pass, reports the LA Times.
and
So far, he says, the Interior Department has been telling the wind industry: “‘No matter what you do, you need not worry about being prosecuted.’
If you shoot a bird, you go to prison. Hell, if you’re caught NEAR a dead bird you risk a huge fine. But you can put up a windmill and kill as many as you like, no problem.
Disgusting.
Regarding rainbow powered ponies, and emotional responses, here’s what I find works on an emotional level when I talk to my fellow liberals: space-based solar power, safe microwave beams and high temperature superconductors for energy transmission, and flyweels for energy storage. 🙂 Whether it makes sense or not is not the point — this is one set of technologies that I find can avoid the “icky!” response. Microwave beams are the weak link, of course.
Come on, now! Space-based solar power stations, safe microwave beams, and high temperature superconductors for energy have an equal grounding in reality as the rainbow powered ponies on the other side of the argument.
You are both wrong. Portable fusion reactors are the way to go.
Portable
Optimized
Nuclear
Y-Y not?
P-O-N-Y!
Hey. 🙂
Use the “personal” buzzword from modern electronic devices and toss in a carbon compound liike benzene as a coolant or lubricant, put it in a big Chevy SUV chassis, and call it the
Personal
Organic
Nuclear
Yukon
No, they wont. Even on coal grids, electric cars produce less CO2 than gas cars.. don’t argue with them on their own turf, you’ll lose. The only sensible argument against electric cars is the absurd amounts of government subsidies that are going into them… government subsidies are wrong, not electric cars.
Trent,
I realize that most large power plants are better optimized and thus more efficient than the average car. But after line transmission and efficiency loss in the electric motor and batteries (stubborn fact 1), do you really believe that’s true rather than a textbook assumption?
However, I do agree that there are plenty of other faults. Besides government subsidies, there is also the issue of recharging batteries and the heat generated from that activity. Already, electric cars and charging stations are having fire problems, and thats with current (no pun intended) chargers. But we keep getting promised “faster” recharge stations, which means energy transfer at an even faster rate causing even greater heat levels. Its like the concept of resistance is forgotten.
And that’s assuming using the fairly clean power plants of the western world. If a country like China were to go electric for car transportation it would actually be much more polluting than gasoline ICE propulsion.
Trent wrote:
“Even on coal grids, electric cars produce less CO2 than gas cars..”
That only matters if you care one whit about the amount of CO2 you are producing.
So I would reject their premise that generating CO2 is bad.
“The only sensible argument against electric cars…”
How about relatively low range between “recharge”, and light vehicles which do not protect very well in a crash?
Sure, or just that it’s not a mature technology.. whereas ICEs are. I meant political argument. Personally, I think the biggest battle against government subsidies of electric cars is that the government *also* subsidizes petrochemicals.. so a consumer who is against subsidies simply can’t win.
But the subsidies that petrochemical companies get are available to any business. Green energy on the other hand gets a wide range of subsidies that only apply to renewable sources of energy. Hell they even get subsidies for NOT making power.
Uh, I think you’re wrong, there. Even the least efficient gasoline car produces 15% less CO2 per mile than the most efficient electric car (of the same size). The most efficient gasoline cars do considerably better.
I’ve seen the Left’s attempts at accounting for the energy usage of each, and even where they have a glimmer of technical insight (a rarity), they literally make up figures for the efficiency of electrical production and use. I do this kind of thing for a living, and have learned from more than 30 years of hard experience.
Any way I could get my power from an atomic-powered lizard instead of a rainbow pony?
The Japanese auto makers tried atomic powered lizards and barely survived the lawsuits after Tokyo got trampled.
The problem with the left is they don’t care for laws that they didn’t write. Be it economic ones or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
What’s needed to replace liquid fuels is another energy source with equal or better energy density. One way to get around this is renewably-produced liquid fuels such as, perhaps, algae biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol. Another really way-out-there possibility is focus fusion; because of the way this process works, it might be usable in large vehicles such as locomotives and heavy trucks – and, just possibly, in car engines. And proton/B11 fusion produces no radioactivity.
Even if that particular dream doesn’t work, radioactivity-free nuclear power leaves us with the possibility of making liquid fuels – the system would work in much the same way as the much-touted “hydrogen economy” would work.
Incidentally, the energy density of decaborane (the most likely fuel for such a fusion reactor) is roughly six orders of magnitude greater than that of gasoline. If you ran your typical American car (25 miles per gallon) on this it would get roughly 150 miles per microlitre. (if my arithmetic works.) Or 75,000 miles on a teaspoonful.
p-B11 fusion produces no radioactivity, sure, but it also currently produces no energy. Ditto for algae and plant fibers, for different reasons (namely the low efficiency of photosynthesis and the obnoxious degree of surface area required).
The only way we get the energy density we need (not want, need, people will die without it) with proven science and engineering nuclear fission. We can use the energy liberated (not created, liberated) to make liquid fuels with well-understood chemistry that doesn’t require a biological intermediary. Look up LANL’s Green Freedom paper. It’s a few years out of date now, but the economics of the idea have actually improved in that time.
We could also use the electricity from fission to run coal-to-liquids and bring the created fuel costs down even farther (not to mention burn the coal more cleanly), but that’s just crazy rightwing nuttery, I’m sure.
We can use the energy liberated (not created, liberated) to make liquid fuels with well-understood chemistry that doesn’t require a biological intermediary.
Coal to liquids (Coal -> CO + H2 -> methanol -> dimethyl ether -> octane) is quite doable and the cost is competitive with petroleum priced above about $80 a barrel. The energy to drive te reaction is currently taken from the partial combustion of the coal, but if it was instead provided as direct thermal energy from a lithium fluride reactor the conversion efficiency should go way up and the price should come down. Plus, it will take us centuries to run out of coal, and thousands of years to run out of thorium, and the coal ash contains enough thorium to resupply the reactors.
This is precisely my thinking on the matter. The LANL paper was based around atmospheric ingest of CO2 and H2O, using the reactor (U, sadly, not Th) to run a series of catalyzed reactions that amounted to inverse combustion. They came up with a cost of something like $4.50/gallon of octane. Driving C2L with reactor heat would have dirt cheap fuel yields by comparison, and you wouldn’t even need to divert the electricity stream from the reactor to do it.
I wonder why the green left doesn’t push for massive investment in fusion research, and dump all of the other alternative energy programs? Get that, and they’ll have the clean energy grail, right? And fusion is at least theoretically possible, though whether it’s economically feasible can’t be answered until it’s technically feasible.
Fusion isn’t . . . constrained.
For some greens, the limitations on most alternative energies are the point.
True. The goal of many environmentalists seems to be to get back to the mythical pastoral lifestyle–a post-industrial, post-technological world. With no nukes, no guns, no cars.
There are a few environmentalists who have embraced nuclear fission, but very few.
With no nukes, no guns, no cars.
But with iPhones and Starbucks!
And holistic medicine and herbal teas that work better than anything from Big Pharma. Because natural is always better.
Less we forget, free contraceptives and no Big Pharma…
“I wonder why the green left doesn’t push for massive investment in fusion research, and dump all of the other alternative energy programs? ”
Because it has nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with control.
The thought of cheap plentiful power horrifies the greens because that allows humans to do more of what the greens hate:
build, modify, spread, affect…..
Nothing in the green catechism talks about opening a new world of plenty. It’s all about restriction. They want fewer cars, houses, sprawl, airplanes, boats, and NASCAR race cars.
most important:
fewer people
The liberals on one of the liberal blogs I read are excited about this:
(Actually, I’d really enjoy hearing anyone’s opinion, positive or negative, about the technique.)
Creating a sufficiently spherical implosion wave through a moving fluid of lithiium and lead of varying temperature and pressure, using steam driven hammers, seems extraordinarily difficult to pull off. But since they’re getting funding from Canada and LLNL, the models and simulations must indicate that it’s feasible.
I’d think the main problem with it might be the waste lead mixed with radioactive decay products, which will end up in children’s toys, bedding, and pajamas imported from China.
It sounds less efficacious than imploding bridge tubes made of Li-D-T, and tested (unsuccessfully) at Livermore some 35 years ago…
Wired had an article a while back, Why the clean tech boom went bust. It explained a lot of the problems with the green industry but the comments were a great example of the left’s war on science.
Thank for the link, Wodun. The comments were quite interesting. The greens still believe that oil and gas is being subsidized just like the alternative energy industry. Their poor economic sense can’t differentiate between actual subsidy where the government doles out tax dollars, and tax incentives where companies use their own money to take advantage of a reduced tax rate. These people are still all about zero-sum economics with government as the provider of wealth.
Perhaps you could have them look for this mysterious subsidy. The US uses 19.2 million barrels of oil per day. If the true cost was $200 a barrel and subsidies are cutting that to $100 a barrel, there should be a $700 billion dollar line item in the federal budget somewhere, which is larger than all defense spending. To pay for it, the half of Americans who pay income tax should be shellng out $4,600 each, or perhaps $5,000 to cover the overhead in keeping such a massive program absolutely secret, to where Wikileaks can’t even sniff up a mention of it.
Future vehicles should burn Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) with possibly a liquid (Gasoline / Methanol / Ethanol) storage as a backup. No special (unknown) carburetion or injection is needed to burn CNG, so it can be the fuel of the future, as the US has enough Natural Gas to power ALL land vehicles. CNG is superior to GME in engine wear. We would still need liquid fuels for airplanes, boats, lawnmowers, etc., after the transition, however.
Bob Zubrin proposes the Multifuel (GME) approach, but for local delivery vehicles CNG should be used. Every town over some reasonable number (say 30,000) should have a CNG station for its fleet, and other local delivery users, such as the US Postal Service, Fed Ex, UPS, etc., could also tap into such a station. The present Honda CNG Civic with a GME liquid backup would be perfect right now, given a reasonable price. And every service station could slowly change to CNG, as they did from leaded to unleaded gasoline, once the demand kicks in. CNG is the superior “battery” technology.
CNG is certainly a viable options for most cars but I’m not so certain about for diesel engines such as in heavy trucks. Would you have to replace the diesel engine or is it possible to convert a diesel for CNG?
For diesels I’d convert either coal or natural gas to dimethyl ether (DME), which is non-toxic and a direct replacement for propane. It also has a cetane number that’s better than diesel fuel. The only required modifications are for extra oil lubrication around the valves, since some diesel engines used the fuel itself as a lubricant. The Chinese have already converted lots of buses to run on DME.
Larry and George – your points on diesel conversions are correct. For big cross-country trucks, CNG tank size might be impractical. Using CNG should reduce both gasoline and diesel prices to help eliminate foreign oil blackmail. If the government should mandate anything, local CNG usage would be best.
There’s another consideration – I’ve seen many places where they won’t allow any vehicle with pressurized gas cylinders to use tunnels. I know they’re mostly talking about things like campers and RVs but it’s still a consideration in some places. I’ve heard of terrible explosions in the relatively confined space of a tunnel. This seems less likely an issue for cars designed to use CNG because they’d have the structure to protect the tank. However, for retrofit conversions, it’d be harder to add that kind of protection. This is only an issue in relatively few places but that could be an issue for big trucks.
I think part of the left’s fascination may stem from thinking that electricity comes from a plug in the wall, much like the way milk comes from a grocery store.
Unless the US electric grid goes nuclear, battery powered cars would increase CO2 emissions. The few on the left that realize this and still push for electric cars are probably just viewing it as an interim step until the DOE develops rainbow powered ponies.
I think another part is an “oil is icky” emotional response. It’s black and smelly, it kills birds, it needs to be “cleaned up”, smokestacks, etc. It’s an easy sell.
We have a local commuter train which is diesel–it’d be nice for several reasons to electrify it, but the cost so far has proven prohibitive. Lots of money for proposals for high speed rail from nowhere to nowhere, though, just so long as it doesn’t go close to somewhere on the way.
If you want to kill birds, put up a modern windmill. If you want to waste government money, put in light rail. Bicycle paths isolated from cars are nice but have no funding mechanism. Going back to the 1890’s sounds great to environmentalists / city planners, but it never works.
Back in the 1890s, major cities had a serious problem disposing of the tons of horse manure dropped on the streets every day. Today, that problem is concentrated at City Hall.
If you want to kill birds, put up a modern windmill.
From todays wsj: “Windmills vs. Birds”
About 70 golden eagles are killed every year by turbines at California’s Altamont Pass, reports the LA Times.
and
So far, he says, the Interior Department has been telling the wind industry: “‘No matter what you do, you need not worry about being prosecuted.’
If you shoot a bird, you go to prison. Hell, if you’re caught NEAR a dead bird you risk a huge fine. But you can put up a windmill and kill as many as you like, no problem.
Disgusting.
Regarding rainbow powered ponies, and emotional responses, here’s what I find works on an emotional level when I talk to my fellow liberals: space-based solar power, safe microwave beams and high temperature superconductors for energy transmission, and flyweels for energy storage. 🙂 Whether it makes sense or not is not the point — this is one set of technologies that I find can avoid the “icky!” response. Microwave beams are the weak link, of course.
Come on, now! Space-based solar power stations, safe microwave beams, and high temperature superconductors for energy have an equal grounding in reality as the rainbow powered ponies on the other side of the argument.
You are both wrong. Portable fusion reactors are the way to go.
Portable
Optimized
Nuclear
Y-Y not?
P-O-N-Y!
Hey. 🙂
Use the “personal” buzzword from modern electronic devices and toss in a carbon compound liike benzene as a coolant or lubricant, put it in a big Chevy SUV chassis, and call it the
Personal
Organic
Nuclear
Yukon
No, they wont. Even on coal grids, electric cars produce less CO2 than gas cars.. don’t argue with them on their own turf, you’ll lose. The only sensible argument against electric cars is the absurd amounts of government subsidies that are going into them… government subsidies are wrong, not electric cars.
Trent,
I realize that most large power plants are better optimized and thus more efficient than the average car. But after line transmission and efficiency loss in the electric motor and batteries (stubborn fact 1), do you really believe that’s true rather than a textbook assumption?
However, I do agree that there are plenty of other faults. Besides government subsidies, there is also the issue of recharging batteries and the heat generated from that activity. Already, electric cars and charging stations are having fire problems, and thats with current (no pun intended) chargers. But we keep getting promised “faster” recharge stations, which means energy transfer at an even faster rate causing even greater heat levels. Its like the concept of resistance is forgotten.
And that’s assuming using the fairly clean power plants of the western world. If a country like China were to go electric for car transportation it would actually be much more polluting than gasoline ICE propulsion.
Trent wrote:
“Even on coal grids, electric cars produce less CO2 than gas cars..”
That only matters if you care one whit about the amount of CO2 you are producing.
So I would reject their premise that generating CO2 is bad.
“The only sensible argument against electric cars…”
How about relatively low range between “recharge”, and light vehicles which do not protect very well in a crash?
Sure, or just that it’s not a mature technology.. whereas ICEs are. I meant political argument. Personally, I think the biggest battle against government subsidies of electric cars is that the government *also* subsidizes petrochemicals.. so a consumer who is against subsidies simply can’t win.
But the subsidies that petrochemical companies get are available to any business. Green energy on the other hand gets a wide range of subsidies that only apply to renewable sources of energy. Hell they even get subsidies for NOT making power.
Uh, I think you’re wrong, there. Even the least efficient gasoline car produces 15% less CO2 per mile than the most efficient electric car (of the same size). The most efficient gasoline cars do considerably better.
I’ve seen the Left’s attempts at accounting for the energy usage of each, and even where they have a glimmer of technical insight (a rarity), they literally make up figures for the efficiency of electrical production and use. I do this kind of thing for a living, and have learned from more than 30 years of hard experience.
Any way I could get my power from an atomic-powered lizard instead of a rainbow pony?
The Japanese auto makers tried atomic powered lizards and barely survived the lawsuits after Tokyo got trampled.
The problem with the left is they don’t care for laws that they didn’t write. Be it economic ones or the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
What’s needed to replace liquid fuels is another energy source with equal or better energy density. One way to get around this is renewably-produced liquid fuels such as, perhaps, algae biodiesel or cellulosic ethanol. Another really way-out-there possibility is focus fusion; because of the way this process works, it might be usable in large vehicles such as locomotives and heavy trucks – and, just possibly, in car engines. And proton/B11 fusion produces no radioactivity.
Even if that particular dream doesn’t work, radioactivity-free nuclear power leaves us with the possibility of making liquid fuels – the system would work in much the same way as the much-touted “hydrogen economy” would work.
Incidentally, the energy density of decaborane (the most likely fuel for such a fusion reactor) is roughly six orders of magnitude greater than that of gasoline. If you ran your typical American car (25 miles per gallon) on this it would get roughly 150 miles per microlitre. (if my arithmetic works.) Or 75,000 miles on a teaspoonful.
p-B11 fusion produces no radioactivity, sure, but it also currently produces no energy. Ditto for algae and plant fibers, for different reasons (namely the low efficiency of photosynthesis and the obnoxious degree of surface area required).
The only way we get the energy density we need (not want, need, people will die without it) with proven science and engineering nuclear fission. We can use the energy liberated (not created, liberated) to make liquid fuels with well-understood chemistry that doesn’t require a biological intermediary. Look up LANL’s Green Freedom paper. It’s a few years out of date now, but the economics of the idea have actually improved in that time.
We could also use the electricity from fission to run coal-to-liquids and bring the created fuel costs down even farther (not to mention burn the coal more cleanly), but that’s just crazy rightwing nuttery, I’m sure.
We can use the energy liberated (not created, liberated) to make liquid fuels with well-understood chemistry that doesn’t require a biological intermediary.
Coal to liquids (Coal -> CO + H2 -> methanol -> dimethyl ether -> octane) is quite doable and the cost is competitive with petroleum priced above about $80 a barrel. The energy to drive te reaction is currently taken from the partial combustion of the coal, but if it was instead provided as direct thermal energy from a lithium fluride reactor the conversion efficiency should go way up and the price should come down. Plus, it will take us centuries to run out of coal, and thousands of years to run out of thorium, and the coal ash contains enough thorium to resupply the reactors.
This is precisely my thinking on the matter. The LANL paper was based around atmospheric ingest of CO2 and H2O, using the reactor (U, sadly, not Th) to run a series of catalyzed reactions that amounted to inverse combustion. They came up with a cost of something like $4.50/gallon of octane. Driving C2L with reactor heat would have dirt cheap fuel yields by comparison, and you wouldn’t even need to divert the electricity stream from the reactor to do it.
I wonder why the green left doesn’t push for massive investment in fusion research, and dump all of the other alternative energy programs? Get that, and they’ll have the clean energy grail, right? And fusion is at least theoretically possible, though whether it’s economically feasible can’t be answered until it’s technically feasible.
Fusion isn’t . . . constrained.
For some greens, the limitations on most alternative energies are the point.
True. The goal of many environmentalists seems to be to get back to the mythical pastoral lifestyle–a post-industrial, post-technological world. With no nukes, no guns, no cars.
There are a few environmentalists who have embraced nuclear fission, but very few.
With no nukes, no guns, no cars.
But with iPhones and Starbucks!
And holistic medicine and herbal teas that work better than anything from Big Pharma. Because natural is always better.
Less we forget, free contraceptives and no Big Pharma…
“I wonder why the green left doesn’t push for massive investment in fusion research, and dump all of the other alternative energy programs? ”
Because it has nothing to do with environmentalism and everything to do with control.
The thought of cheap plentiful power horrifies the greens because that allows humans to do more of what the greens hate:
build, modify, spread, affect…..
Nothing in the green catechism talks about opening a new world of plenty. It’s all about restriction. They want fewer cars, houses, sprawl, airplanes, boats, and NASCAR race cars.
most important:
fewer people
The liberals on one of the liberal blogs I read are excited about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion
It is nutty wonderful fun – check it out!
(Actually, I’d really enjoy hearing anyone’s opinion, positive or negative, about the technique.)
Creating a sufficiently spherical implosion wave through a moving fluid of lithiium and lead of varying temperature and pressure, using steam driven hammers, seems extraordinarily difficult to pull off. But since they’re getting funding from Canada and LLNL, the models and simulations must indicate that it’s feasible.
I’d think the main problem with it might be the waste lead mixed with radioactive decay products, which will end up in children’s toys, bedding, and pajamas imported from China.
It sounds less efficacious than imploding bridge tubes made of Li-D-T, and tested (unsuccessfully) at Livermore some 35 years ago…