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Will Electric Cars Really Go Mainstream
by Steven CraigAdd a comment about anything electric replacing anything powered any other way.
First is every one has a story how much better things will be. This is called hype and just like any story it covers all the good and ignores all the bad.
Electric cars and being green and saving the earth from global warming is all good right?
People that make these stories do not study physics and reality very much until its too late.
They are betting no one pays attention to the old laws of entropy where you never get something for nothing but the smoke screen of the hype story teller hopes you never look into this.
There is always a greater cost to replace something and sometimes it is an all new disaster.
For example:
When I was a child nuclear energy was going to be so cheap to make electric that it would cost too must to measure it so it would be free.
We had a few problems with that scenario.
Only YOU can prevent forest fire and so for decades we allowed old wood to fall and pile up and be ready fuel and not allow infrequent natural fires that release need seeds and reword nutrients into the soil and here we are now burning down several states and adding decades of CO2 buildup to the atmosphere and in a few years new story tellers of hype will be screaming that the world is ending again.
The oceans are so vast that seafood will be an endless source of nutrition and solutions for all farming fertilizer needs and another long list of hype. I miss my $5 bushel of blue crabs.
Oil was $2.10 a barrel. I will go no further on that.
But the internal combustion engine was permanently going to end the foul pollution and infectious environment of city streets due to the millions of tons of horse manure that coated every street and road worldwide. That went on for 8000 years or so since the time horses were put to use by civilization. I guess we will always have that as long as there are military parades after an election.
Remember that thing called an ice age? There was no CNN there to video it but there was ICE in glaciers that were in places 2 miles and more thick over millions of square miles for the better part of a million years. Accounting to realistic research in Canada which had a big investment in ICE at the time to melt the ice in the province of Alberta as quickly as happening in the list say 15000 or so years of that age, the earth had to heat up to more than 14 deg C for several thousand years. There were no cars and smoke stacks and all that then. Just solar radiation and volcanic gases. Then it cooled back down for a while.
But I digress
Entropy does not mix with hype at all.
Electric anything then.
As miss Nessa says you still need electricity. Fuel, plant, generation, waste products, distribution, maintenance, supply and all in a consistent and pretty much going forward guarantee of near permanence.
Beyond a computable tipping point (there's that term in the right place) there will not be enough electricity generation with something fantastic happening
Solar don't work at night and in clouds and you get less nearer the poles
Wind is also something you can not count on
Ocean currents turning generators is just a bad idea if you really want ocean currents to work as they should
Nuclear is great if you do it right like the French did with breeder reactors that consume their own waste.
But it still is never going to be enough and even when you have some of that plant in place you still need to deliver it
And all that electric product manufacturing and generation and use environment will eventually have an end of life and you have to dispose of it and start all over again with replacements.
We used to dispose of old infrastructure by dumping it in the oceans or in the desolate fields or burning it. That has fallen out of favor and will be more expensive now
And there is considerable study producing evidence and numbers that recycling some of this infrastructure will certainly cost more or be prohibited that mining and building new things from scratch.
Like the so called free nuclear power story disposing of spent fuel and plant. We are still looking for a place and method.
Thus I submit that entropy rules and the hype while glorious and sublime is just more ruination to occur in the future.
And here we are again.
The electric car will end all this chaos
Don't look at that man behind the green curtain (pun) that is working with all this raw material to make an infrastructure that will absolutely according to the laws of entropy become a still greater problem for the future after the hype stories are told and done.
10/30/2019 Author's Note: Challenge you to try it without making things worst
Posted on 10/30/2019
Copyright © 2024 Steven Craig
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