At first I was surprised to see a Hummer rumble up to an outdoor reception for the 11th Hour Project, a group focused on solutions for global warming.
Brazil has made a dramatic shift to ethanol. Flex-fuel vehicle sales went from 4% to 80% in the past 3 years (Vinod’s dinner talk).
Sure, they might be helping by using biodiesel, but they still don’t know how to park.
Jurvetsonian: a nation "addicted to fried food" means a steady supply of biodiesel (with apologies to "W"’s comment about a nation addicted to oil – which makes the CEO’s of Exxon, Mobil, Shell the nation’s ‘drug pushers’ and the administration their ‘protection’, no?)
Rocketeer: well spoken! If you’ve ever been in one of those ridiculous useless things, that’s as close as the visibility allows.
Benjimin: Most of our century’s technical ‘problems’ were solved long ago, including the curing of cancer and other ‘unsolvables’ (bull). Its getting through the iron fist of those that oppose change that doesn’t financialy favor them that’s thwarting every effort on every front: medicine, energy, healthcare etc. Any ideas for that? Till then its re-inventing the same solutions, and having them shelved, destroyed and sidelined by the…. well, what’s a nice name for the stupid selfish shortsighted power mongering people in the way?
Alianess: Putting this altogether, the best solution is to steal (pirate) a hummer, fill it with biodiesel and drive it into the headquarters of Exxon?
Ashkan: Yes, new car sales in Brazil made a dramatic change in a short period of time. The stat came from Vinod Khosla’s talk over dinner.
Brazil reduced petroleum use for cars and light trucks by 40%, saved $50B on oil imports, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by ~70%.
You can download Vinod’s PPT presentation here
gocarrt: I’d bet on plug-in hybrids making the pragmatic play before hydrogen:
Yah, though both extensive use of high current recharging and hydrogen requrire infrastructure investment. I dunno what’s easier, bigger lines to many many homes, or figuring out how to do hydrogen safely. Hydrogen is hard to keep cooped up at the pressures needed, unfortunately.
I heard a play for a methanol infrastructure last friday on NPR, but I’ve heard that it’s more corrosive than ethanol or oil/gasoline/natural gas, so it’s not as transparent a play as advertised.
Well, Nuclear and hydrogen are actually options that make up a full solution, not different solutions. Hydrogen is one proposal to replace petrol-fuels, for applications that need portable high energy density fuels. Hydrogen only stores energy produced other ways, like like nuclear or solar. Seems like a good diversionary tactic has been set up, focus on hydrogen as clean fuel and you get credit, never mind about all the other things that must happen first that you’re not willing to spend big on.
one mlight have wondered once what the effect of the US having focused on alternative energy research would have been, ala Manhattan Project, instead of depleting the treasury and devaluing the dollar for other less economically productive ends — has this become a politcal thread?
Victor, the problem with the people you mention is that they are shortsighted, as you say, and do not see even the medium-term, not to mention long-term economic benefits they could reap from something as bizarre as investment….
Yah, I think the politics have come out, but it’s not surprising. There is so much more that needs to be done as fossil fuels progressively fail to be the cheap dependable fuel we’ve been depending on for the last 80+ years…
Steve, do you know how much infrastructure upgrade will be neccessary if a large number of people go to Hot plug hybrids?
Seems to me, despite the vehicle technologies under development, the real question is fuel source and challenges.
– Hydrogen: where does it come from? Non-renewable natural gas?
– Plug in/Hybrid: Where does the energy come from? Majority of US electricity is made from coal. Can the grid withstand the intensive electricity usage surge from powering our vehicles?
– Biofuels: Do we have land for feedstocks?
I bet on biofuels near-term.
Yah, that’s what we’re saying. They all have their problems, from being too hard (fusion) to needing huge infrastructure upgrades. Which one will be most pallatable? Probably biofuels will come to the fore in a big way in the near future, followed by the expansion of the power grid including use of nuclear solar and wind, maybe followed by wide scale use of plug-in hybrids if we find we can’t produce enough biomass after all. (It should be noted, however, that Hybrids are inefficient in their own way, since the vehicles are much heavier than the conventional vehicles of the same size, and you don’t neccessarily have the ability to recover all that energy when you slow down.)
Biofuels are a good start, especially if we could make our garbage/sewage turn into Bio Fuel. There is a troublesome aspect to Biofuels though, if you don’t create enough new biomass, biofuels will more of the same, using up a limited resource and putting more C02 into the atmosphere to satisfy our energy thirst.
Edit: Oop, over shortened and lost a point. The danger to biofuel as it gets easier/cheaper to produce is that we decide to import our biofuel from other countries because it’s cheaper and start using up the other country’s bioresevoir instead of our own. We currently treat imports as giving developing nations new opportunities, in effect laundering the distasteful parts away. Who knows if we’ll do the same thing with biofuel, negating the environmental benefits.
@rrlem:
You dismiss plug-in EVs and plug-in hybrids because in the US, most electricity is generated by burning coal.
This is true, but because power comes from the grid, there’s the possibility of renewable and sustainable sources of power like solar power to be put into the mix. In the future we will change the balance and shift away from coal.
Also… you can’t assume that because power is generated at a power plant with coal that that is automatically more polluting than thousands of gasoline burning cars. You are making the "long tailpipe" argument, which has been debunked.
http://www.electroauto.com/info/pollmyth.shtml
In fact, there stands a net gain. Even if you don’t change the polluting coal power plants, you end up putting less pollution into the air, and cost you less money to use grid electricity rather than gasoline.
@BenODen
Your comment about hybrids and curb weight has some merit to it, but it is misleading to say "hybrids are inefficient" because their curb weight is higher… more inefficient compared to what?
The Camry Hybrid has a curb weight of 3680. The non hybrid inline-4 version of the Camry weighs 3307. That’s almost 400 lbs, yes… but by your implication, the hybrid should get worse fuel economy because heavier = more inefficient…. but the hybrid gets 40/38. The I4 gets 24/33.
BMW and other manufacturers have argued that the hybrid parts of the car are "dead weight" at highway speeds… why then does the hybrid Camry not have worse fuel economy than the I4 which doesn’t have the extra weight?
You are correct that there is extra weight, but "inefficient" is highly misleading. The way i see it, the extra weight of the components is easily made up for by the boost in fuel economy and performance (yes the hybrid Camry performs better than the I4 Camry.)
You are correct that hybrids don’t capture all of the energy of slowing down with regenerative braking. The laws of thermodynamics get in the way of that… but I don’t see your point. A regular car has no way of capturing any of that energy, while hybrids at least get a portion of it… a regular car converts most of the energy slowing down to heat.
Steve, Great work as usual. And thanks as usual for sharing with Creative Commons. I used this with an article update on the ethanol-environment-food-for-fuel debate. I believe Brazil is actually turning back the clock on ethanol. I saw a presentation at the UN last year where a Brazilian official showed stats of nearly 100 percent ethanol usage for transportation several decades ago, but the technology fell out of favor.
Here is my picture about Global Warming. Please take a look at it 🙂
http://www.flickr.com/photos/museumofworldwonders/5490511178/
At December’s U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world’s top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media-generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" —– Dr. Kunihiko, Chancellor of Japan’s Institute of Science and Technology said this: "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other … every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so." (John Tomlinson, Flint Journal, January 19, 2009)
http://www.mlive.com/opinion/flint/index.ssf/2009/01/its_time_to...
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