nxdefiant

Those ACEEE numbers are predicated on placing an economic cost on pollution. If you assign a larger price to the pollution, even the PHEV's fall right off the chart. The E in their name stands for "Economy". They're focus is framing clean as a function of the economy. In their model, you can kill a bunch more people and the price of pollution only goes up a little. They even say they've left that number constant since 1998. If you value pollution in a logarithmic scale that gets way worse as time goes on, it becomes obvious that the only acceptable vehicles are the ones that have negative pollution costs. Since we dont have vehicles that can remove pollution from the air, getting one that gets as close to zero is the best bet. Right now, EV's get the closest to zero.

A PHEV still has a battery. We're going to be doing that mining anyway. And we're definitely going to be using every single battery we can make. So, what's the point of burning fuels if you can do it all with batteries, which should continue to get better over time? It doesn't matter if EV's are slightly less efficient than a handful of PHEVS if they're using clean energy to charge. Once the lithium and rare earth minerals are mined they're recyclable, and their value over time will actually make it important to do so.

And, yet again, burning fuels has to stop. We need to stop putting sequestered carbon in the air. And no, switching the globe to "renewable carbon" via biomass isn't going to work.

Pretty much. We have scientists looking into high density, multi level automated hydroponic crop production in order to stop relying on having enough sky and land for food. Using more land for biomass to produce fuel feels willfully evil at this point.

weight doesn't really matter. Trains weigh a FUCKLOAD but are the most efficient means of travel simply because they don't stop once they start rolling, and are shaped such that they're not affected much by wind resistance.

Cars go fast enough that air resistance is a much greater contributing factor to their efficiency than weight is. In general cars are the problem regardless of their efficiency, because they're always going to be the worst choice for moving anything: they're useful because of their convenience.

So, since we can't get rid of cars, the best choice is to make their impact on our carbon problem as lessened as possible, and the best way to do that is to stop burning things to make them move.

1. there would be nothing natural about it if you're cutting it all down and fertilizing it on a cycle, that's just agriculture.

2. yes, it would probably be less impactful than corn, but at the scale you're talking about, were shifting all the ethanol corn + all that land times 10 from whatever it's doing over to industrial scale farm land. that means making it flat, building machines, securing water sources (yet another resource we don't exactly have an overabundance of), scaling out the logistics of shipping and processing by 10X for a distributed fuel making infrastructure.

There's only ~ 2 billion acres of area in the U.S. and you want to use 10% of it for making fuel, and that's just for people who drive cars, not Trucking, not Trains, not Planes, not anything that runs on diesel. That's about a third of what we use for cattle, and cattle use land that's not good for growing anything at agricultural scale.

That much land could produce 2560 terrawatts from solar alone, and we can spread that out over existing land, like roofs, deserts, parking lots and roads, which would account for half the power the U.S. uses annually. So using less land we could increase U.S. power production by 50% (and doing that only with solar would probably be the least efficient way to do it). Cheap, clean, distributed power is far more useful than expensive distributed not clean fuel.

Biomass as a fuel can't scale. It does ZERO to help with our carbon problem, and it perpetuates current infrastructure that is actively killing everyone.

There's probably a case for replacing gas power plants with biomass powerplants that grow and process locally, cutting out all the transport logistics to increase efficiency while reducing overall carbon footprint, but in general burning things is a bad plan. Using small inefficient engines to burn things on demand everywhere is an even worse plan.

https://cuberule.com/

Welcome to the future. It is a utopia here, where arguments about food categorization are a thing seen only in historical fiction and meme museums.

Ok, so convert 25% of all U.S. farmland at a minimum to a completely new crop. That's sure to be carbon neutral 🙄. What should the other 7.7 ish billion humans do?

Burning things was always a bad plan, and continues to be a bad plan!

Wet Salad.

I've got a p16s Gen1 w/the Intel chip because I couldn't wait (I mean literally, I had a deadline) and I am very jealous. Congrats fellow Thinkpad enjoyer.

[I wish I could buy modern Thinkpads with the old keyboards again, I really hate everything past, say, the X1 carbon 5th gen]

In the U.S. alone, we'd need about 200 million acres of farm land to go from 10% ethanol to 100% ethanol. That's using corn and accounts for about 25% of the total farmland the U.S. has. And that's just the U.S. and only counts retail gas with the 10% mandate, - not industrial fuel use of diesel fuel use, which would increase it dramatically. It's not feasible to run the country on biomass , especially as climate change is going to make farm land less viable overall. Given that agriculture is already roughly a third of all carbon emissions, massively ramping up agriculture to replace fossil fuels doesn't really help overall.

On top of that, we need to start sequestering CO2. Moving it from the biomass into the air, even temporarily, keeps it in the air where we do not want it! The only viable long term solution is to move net amounts of carbon out of the air by all means possible, as well as minimizing all the other greenhouse gas produced (like methane). ICE engines cannot be a significant part of this future without ramping up clean energy use elsewhere to sequester more carbon than those fuels are contributing - which leads right back to solar and fission. (and wind, waves, geothermal etc of course).

It can't run on sunlight or fission, so that's a long term no-go.

There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.