Protesters

Ban-jani said:
For me it’s all about time and how much of it we can buy ourselves before technology advances enough.
Click to expand...

Maybe. But the amount of CO2 all humans emit in total, globally every year, is such a tiny percentage of total annual CO2 output (from the sea, from rocks dissolving, from volcanoes etc). I can't recall exactly but from memory it's about 3% is man-made.

The *problem* we've had is that the small amount of extra C02 man produces is just that, extra. And the natural carbon cycle, which absorbs all the other 97%, can't fully accommodate the extra 3%. So over time, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere have steadily increased.

But you can see that if tomorrow we switched off everything, shut down every factory, hospital, steel plant, car, ship, plane, all domestic heating, lighting - basically turned the planet OFF for a year- we'd reduce total C02 output by about 3%. And no-one is talking about doing that, or anything like it. We simply couldn't.

The pitiful decreases we can bring about, might conceivably make a difference, but personally I can't see it. It will take decades. As I said before it's like steering a supertanker and we've been heading in the wrong direction for over 100 years. I think things will run their coarse and we'll see some moderate 2c to 4C global temperature rises before the natural CO2 sinks and feedback mechanisms begin to take up the strain. I don't think there's much we can do about it at this point.
 
Chippy_boy said:
Some perspective when considering electric cars:

Most of our electricity generation is still carbon burning. You burn oil, gas or coal, to heat water to generate steam, which drives turbines, which drive generators. The electricity is then transformed to high voltage for transmission. It's transmitted great distances, then transformed back to mains voltage at the substation. Back to the charging point, it's transformed again and then in your car it's converted to chemical energy in the battery. Then to actually drive the car, the chemical energy is converter to electricity again.

All if these conversations are lossy, i.e. some of the energy is lost as heat in every step of the process.

Vs generating the power needed right there in your car by burning the fossil fuel in situe and avoid most of the conversation steps.

Then you have to factor in the energy cost of producing and disposing of the lithium batteries.

Factoring all of these things, electric cars are still more efficient and are responsible for about 75% of the amount of C02 that petrol or diesel cars.. So if everyone switched tomorrow, you'd reduce CO2 output by around 25%.

All road transport accounts for about 15% of man made CO2 output. And that's lorries, vans, coaches, buses, cars etc. Cars are just over half of that around 8% or 9%. So changing all cars to electric would yield a 25% drop in ~8% of the output, i.e. a circa 2% overall reduction in CO2 output. Hardly "enormous" and that's if we switched all cars over to electric.

Of course as we generate more and more electricity from renewables, the savings would get better. If we could generate all electricity from renewables then cars would be around 67% more CO2 efficient, not 25%. And you'd be looking at a 5% or 6% drop in total CO2 output if all cars went electric.

But on cold still nights when we're at home charging our electric cars, we have hardly any renewable sources, so until we have a massive investment in nuclear, carbon burning will be the primary source of fuel for powering electric cars.
Click to expand...
Did you cut and paste that?

If not - congrats - I know it might be seen as obvious stuff, but I found hat a really helpful summary
 
Armchair Supporter said:
Yea, good point, i forgot that one. Also huge.
Once you do that, a car just becomes public transport along with all of the economies of scale that has.
Click to expand...
Just had a 'flashback'

Was it Johnny cabs in Total Recall?

Strangely - that world is not too far away
 
Chippy_boy said:
Some perspective when considering electric cars:

Most of our electricity generation is still carbon burning. You burn oil, gas or coal, to heat water to generate steam, which drives turbines, which drive generators. The electricity is then transformed to high voltage for transmission. It's transmitted great distances, then transformed back to mains voltage at the substation. Back to the charging point, it's transformed again and then in your car it's converted to chemical energy in the battery. Then to actually drive the car, the chemical energy is converter to electricity again.

All if these conversations are lossy, i.e. some of the energy is lost as heat in every step of the process.

Vs generating the power needed right there in your car by burning the fossil fuel in situe and avoid most of the conversation steps.

Then you have to factor in the energy cost of producing and disposing of the lithium batteries.

Factoring all of these things, electric cars are still more efficient and are responsible for about 75% of the amount of C02 that petrol or diesel cars.. So if everyone switched tomorrow, you'd reduce CO2 output by around 25%.

All road transport accounts for about 15% of man made CO2 output. And that's lorries, vans, coaches, buses, cars etc. Cars are just over half of that around 8% or 9%. So changing all cars to electric would yield a 25% drop in ~8% of the output, i.e. a circa 2% overall reduction in CO2 output. Hardly "enormous" and that's if we switched all cars over to electric.

Of course as we generate more and more electricity from renewables, the savings would get better. If we could generate all electricity from renewables then cars would be around 67% more CO2 efficient, not 25%. And you'd be looking at a 5% or 6% drop in total CO2 output if all cars went electric.

But on cold still nights when we're at home charging our electric cars, we have hardly any renewable sources, so until we have a massive investment in nuclear, carbon burning will be the primary source of fuel for powering electric cars.
Click to expand...
Good post. However it points to developing a more efficient means of storing energy in your car if savings in carbon emissions were to be more significant. Maybe by burning traditional fuels but employing carbon capture techniques like they do in some power stations. I have absolutely no idea whether carbon capture is scalable or how good it is though.
 
west didsblue said:
Good post. However it points to developing a more efficient means of storing energy in your car if savings in carbon emissions were to be more significant. Maybe by burning traditional fuels but employing carbon capture techniques like they do in some power stations. I have absolutely no idea whether carbon capture is scalable or how good it is though.
Click to expand...

it's incredibly costly and energy intensive unless you have a viable use for the CO2, which generally we don't and if we do that tends to mean not actually capturing it, just delaying the release.

Having said that everything is incredibly costly and energy intensive before the technology matures.
 
Chippy_boy said:
Totally agree with you about destruction of habitat, pollution, dumping of plastic wastei. The oceans etc. If people want to protest about that, I am all for it. That said, not in London

The UK is pretty much irrelevant in all of that and have more or less got our house in order already. It's the developing world whose continued activities are often shameful.
Click to expand...

Rubbish.
 
Should I buy an electric car or just run and jog wherever I want to go? If there were a farm near here I could get all my shopping from them and should I never fly in a jet or get in a car again?

What's the solution?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
✖
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.