Those sources are not viable today.

 

Cool. Then some Democratic presidential candidate can claim, "We're gonna put those gas and oil rig workers out of work!" and then lose the election to Eric Trump.

 

The premise of the electric vehicle is that someday we will invent a battery technology that doesn't pollute more than gas. Right now, a Tesla has to be driven for more than 8 years to have a break even carbon footprint over a gasser, then it starts saving the environment. Green tech isn't green, it's setting up an infrastructure that could be green some day, if we can go around the laws of thermodynamics.

 

Yea, electric vehicles have a higher carbon foot print to manufacturer, but produce less carbon over its life span, but is recouped rather quickly.

I'd be curious to see the source of your 8 year break even.

http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/...ull-report.pdf

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Page 21

 

So the potential catastrophic consequences to 10's of millions of people isn't worth hysteria to you? You don't think that perhaps that is his concern?

And if you don't believe it, I suppose you would support doing more research to determine the exact effects, since many scientists are concerned climate change could be the end of a significant portion of species on the planet?

 

The source is the actual manufacturing process, vs the assumed model manufacturing process, that is where Green technology is a scam. Read the modeling assumptions in that article you posted, they assume the battery is the GREET model applied to the Nissan Leaf. However, the Nissan Leaf is a USA made battery, which is specially manufactured to have the lowest carbon footprint model for comparison. Tesla on the other hand, sources 18650 commodity batteries from Panasonic that are similar to common rechargeable batteries. I'm not even considering the low volume production inefficiencies of Tesla.


Tesla's are a fun, good looking car, but not some environmental friendly alternative.

 

History is full of people who think like you.

From Columbus's expedition of 1492 (which was derided and rejected by his native Portugal as an impossible dream), to man's conquest of space (which was also derided as pure fantasy by those who warned that the vacuum of space would be instantly fatal and the technology would never be invented to conquer it), to the personal computing revolution, history has been full of naysayers who are always ready to tell you why it can't be done.

Fortunately, history tends to relegate people like that to the sidelines.

 

Like I said, the entire climate change phenomenon was presented in entirely the wrong way to the American public. Guilt never works as a tool to change people's behavior.

The question isn't whether oil will be replaced as the planet's primary source of transportation-related fuel (cars, boats, planes, etc) in our lifetime. It will. The question is, what's going to replace it, and who's going to hold the patents on that technology?

Listening to the Trumpniks on this forum, I guess they're happy to let, say, China take that lead. All because they want to spite them durn liberals. It's utterly perplexing to me.

Climate change shouldn't be a question of belief or even politics. Even if you insist on denying it's happening, it's blindingly obvious that our future economic and political security depend on identifying a viable replacement and bringing that technology to the mass market.

Some would say that's not the job of government, that we should leave it to market forces to sort out. To that I would say, if it had not been for the United States government, if we'd relied on private industry to take us into space, we still would be looking up at the moon and wondering when, if ever, we'd visit it.

 

That's absolutely not what's happening, the liberals are the ones blocking next generation nuclear power that the Chinese are working on. Jimmy Carter specifically is the one who ordered it shut down.

 

Turbosina,

I'll make a not very brave prediction here--petroleum won't be replaced in transportation in this century. Oil has too much of a lead in energy density over any foreseeable electrical source. It's something like 20 times more energy-dense than any electrical power source.

The energy density of jet fuel is 12,000 Wh/kg versus the best current rechargeable battery is about 250 Wh/kg. It will take a major breakthrough or nuclear power to replace oil.

GF