Republican introduces new bill to end the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars

[NNadir]

22. I said I was being generous at 90% for all of the conversions, but what does it matter?

Last edited Sat Oct 13, 2018, 12:46 PM - Edit history (3)

The world is getting much, much hotter, and the efficiency of anything electrical goes down under hot conditions.

Suppose that some of these efficiency's fall to 85%. It is well known that electric cars generate considerable heat - and heat is entropy - it's why they are known to sometimes spontaneously burst into flame.

Always when I hear about what I regard as consumerism disguised as environmentalism it's "all new stuff." I don't buy it.

Of course, we could build all new power plants, but what we will build clearly in these benighted times will be gas plants. A combined cycle gas plant operating at 50% thermal efficiency is still a gas plant, and thus a crime against all future generations.

We can quibble forever about scrubbers on power plants in the US; none of them "scrub" carbon dioxide. The thermodynamic penalty for doing that is vast when compared to the thermodynamic penalty of scrubbing sulfates, mercury and lead.

I note that in terms of purification, none of these systems are 100% efficient, and even if they were, one still has to put the sulfur, the mercury and the lead somewhere.

The key difference between your focus and my focus however is that you are concerned only with the United States - a provincial country - and I am interested in the world at large.

There more than a billion people in China; in purely human terms, China is far more important than we are; they matter; we don't, except to the extent that we consume per capita way more than our fair share.

Another difference between you and I is that you are looking to retrofit the car CULTure to be less odious than it has clearly been almost forever, although I will grant that initially it did solve the serious 19th century environmental problem of horseshit on city streets. Unfortunately, it pretty much destroyed and contaminated everything outside of cities.

I am not really ethically willing to have enslaved children dig cobalt in the Congo to get 1 or 2% - should it exist at all, and I doubt that it does - for thermal efficiency of cars in the United States, should such an advantage exist, which I highly doubt.

I'm sorry, but I have not - and will not - read or believe a UCS "study" of anything and if they say that dangerous fossil fuel cars exhibit 15% efficiency, I still must consider the source. I read an interesting article today in a back issue of Nature stating that over 1 million scientific papers are published each year; so many papers that people have to invest in AI type systems just to sort through them to find what may be relevant. As a person who spends at least 5 to 10 hours a week in science libraries wandering aimlessly through tons of literature, I can surely appreciate it that some sources are better than others. It may be true that many gasoline powered vehicles are in fact 15% efficient, but does it matter? Was there no life on earth before the invention of the automobile? A better questions might be will there still be life on Earth after the invention of the automobile.

There are many, many, many studies of "Well to Wheel" efficiency of cars of various types - Google Scholar is your friend. I don't spend a tremendous of time going over them since I wholly reject the car CULTure even though I am a hypocrite as I personally have no real option to escape it myself. I do wish however that people were working toward this escape. The operative word in that search term for me is "well," not "wheel." From the limited number of papers on this topic I've read, it does seem to me that a hybrid vehicle is slightly more efficient than an electric vehicle, but again, it really doesn't matter. Cars are still powered in all cases by dangerous fossil fuels.

The "efficiency will save us" scheme is as much a failure as the "renewable energy will save us" fantasy. I'm sorry, but Amory Lovins is a complete idiot. Jevons wrote about his paradox in the 19th century, and its no less true today than it was then. (Lovins would have been helped if he opened a book, but it seems to be beneath him; this moron has actually stated that he likes to discuss topics authoritatively he knows nothing about.) World energy efficiency is rising; so is energy consumption, by huge amounts because, among other things, the citizens of China did not agree to remain desperately impoverished so suburban Americans could smugly drive to the mall in electrified SUV's at Christmas time to buy Sierra Club calendars.

The same is true for India; and soon enough, Africa.

I am an advocate of nuclear energy as the only sustainable form of energy on this planet, one factor precisely being because it is not distributed energy. (The worst and most egregious example - one the world should have heeded - of the criminality of distributed energy is the automobile.) People always want to challenge me on my nuclear advocacy by stating that there are no nuclear powered cars, which demonstrates graphically their very selective attention; what may be more properly called "grotesque myopia." Now I hate the reflexive use of the world "could" as equivalent to "is," as in an idiot statement from the morally and intellectual Lilliputians at Greenpeace that "Studies show that the world could be powered by 100% renewable energy by 2100." This sort of thinking is contemptuous of every human being who lives after us.

This said, I know, and outlined superficially in my last post in this thread that it is technologically feasible that we could power cars using highly efficient "+1000 C" thermochemical cycles with nuclear as opposed to dangerous fossil fuels as the primary energy source. The question is would this be a wise use for nuclear energy. I suggest it isn't. Nothing, not even marvelous sources of energy like nuclear, can make the car CULTure sustainable, primarily because it is distributed energy writ large, and distributed energy will always involve distributed, diffuse, and thus impossible to manage, pollution. From what you wrote, you seem to get this, but not so much that you are willing to question the whole damned enterprise.