CO2 capture

[SkepticLance]

The Tesla Electric Roadster is a state of the art sports vehicle, making it expensive. It is not the first electric car by far. Smaller, cheaper, and lower performance cars have been available for a while. For example : the Reva Electric Car, made and sold in Bangalore, India, has been going for 7 years now. It is slow, short range, and small, but very cheap to run. An excellent commuter car.

 

http://www.articles2u.com/vehicles/reva-electric-car/

 

As far as electric generation keeping up - well, when has it ever? The whole world has been struggling with under capacity for the past 50 years. The widespread use of electric cars will be a stimulus to new capacity. It is bloody time that the western world woke up to the need for a whole lot more large scale and non greenhouse gas polluting power plants. My bet lies with nuclear reactors. France runs over 70 such plants, selling electricity into much of the rest of Europe, and has never had a significant accident.

[swansont]

In short: WHERE ARE THEY? Everyone's been telling me for the last 4 years about all these cool cars that will come "when the price is right". Can I share something? The price is RIGHT! Yet we've got a $100 thousand dollar sports EV. Cool for racing heads, but where's my 10 to 15 grand affordable run-about?

 

The price has been "right" for about six months. Do you really expect things to be brought to market in that time frame? Asking "WHERE ARE THEY?" is just incredibly obtuse.

[SkepticLance]

Just another city commuter electric car noted today.

 

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4431234a28.html

 

This one is small - golf cart size - with the ability to fold up for easy parking. MIT hope to have the first prototype built in a year.

[iNow]

Looks like fun, but it still needs to be plugged in and the question becomes, "How is THAT energy generated?"

 

Either way, that little bugger'd be great for trips to campus, where parking is a bitch (and also one of the reasons I bought my motorcycle!).

[iNow]

I recall reading that driving is often more "efficient" than walking if your calories were supplied by steak -- the CO₂ emissions from the production of the beef are greater than those from the gasoline in your car.

I've been thinking about this a bit for the past few days. Wouldn't those cows be raised and those food items trucked to stores even if I chose to drive?

 

Does not my driving add a CO₂ contribution ON TOP of the existing contributions from the raising and transporting you reference? I guess I would be curious to see the study...

[Mr Skeptic]

As for bicycles, it depends on what you eat to get the calories to ride. I recall reading that driving is often more "efficient" than walking if your calories were supplied by steak -- the CO₂ emissions from the production of the beef are greater than those from the gasoline in your car.

 

I doubt that the study took into account the efficiency of gasoline production. The amounts of biomatter wasted in turning ancient forests into gasoline has got to be impressive as well. No fair counting the efficiency of making beef but not the efficiency of making gasoline!

[CaptainPanic]

Studies rarely take the entire life cycle into account... That is not necessarily subjective data processing or a conspiracy by big companies. It is actually very very difficult to take all parameters of the earth into one model.

 

Even someting basic as "meat eating vs. driving a car" becomes tricky...

 

there's

-the production of the plant feed for animals (fertilizer, plowing, harvest, storage, irrigation etc...)

-additional nutrition for animals from industrial sources

-medicine and other fine chemicals for animals

-transportation and refrigeration of meat

-storage of meat (up to two years in a storage is common, yes, you eat meat of 2006 today)

-packaging

-cooking of meat

-your own digestive system

-your muscles that you use for walking (some walk more efficient than others)

(And what part of this list is powered by fossil fuels, which by sustainable energy like biomass)?

 

Compare that to the oil well - tanker - oil refinery - gas station - combustion engine - type of car and even type of road (dirt/uphill etc.)... which also contains loads of parameters... and realize that it's damn difficult to compare the two.

 

A study can say anything they like (and get a nice headline, good for newspaper, good for researcher).

[iNow]

A study can say anything they like

But their data and methods must be consistent and replicable. I challenge the root of your point, since if that were truly the case, you'd see all manner of skeptics presenting studies that global climate change ain't happening. However, when they try, their data and/or methods are most frequently error prone and debunked.

 

 

Either way, I agree with your other point that it's difficult to consider every variable. That steak on the dinner table had to be cooked, using electricity or gas most of the time. It had to be transported home from the store in the car, using gas. It had to be kept cool in the store using electricity. It took store employees tending to it releasing energy as they moved, and they had to drive to work too. The steak had to be trucked to the store from the slaughterhouse, and the truck runs on deisel. The slaughterhouse uses energy to process the steer, and all of the employees there expend energy while working and also to travel to and from work. The steer had to be trucked to the slaughterhouse from the farm, using more fuel. The farm had to tend to the steer, .... ad infinitum. I didn't even get into all of the resources it takes to raise the steer and keep it healthy from birth to maturity...

 

Yes... It's difficult to consider all variables in such a study, but nothing is impossible.

[CaptainPanic]

The point I made is not applicable on the entire climate, but more on the individual components in our life (meat, car etc.). Climate studies should all include the same major parameters. Studies on CO2 emissions for meat production will however give a very wide range of numbers, because of different assumptions.

 

We know (roughly) how many kilometers are made by cars yearly. We don't know for what purpose they are made. We know how much coal is burned, but it is less well known what is heated with it (etc etc). Therefore I propose that it might even be easier to make a global climate model than a life cycle assessment of a steak on your plate. (Ok, I am making it easy for you guys to flame me now - I never made a global climate model, and it is most likely very complicated - at least it contains everything, where a life cycle assessment of a steak does certainly not include everything, and the selection of parameters is what makes it so difficult)...

[SkepticLance]

Captainpanic

 

When you suggest a global climate model is complex, you were right. The only way the computer modellers can make it 'work' is to add simplifications and assumptions that are of debatable merit. And on top of that are all the unknowns that have not been quantified.

 

I had this argument with iNow earlier, and I pointed out, that before this just gone northern winter, the global climate models had drastically underestimated Arctic sea ice melting. The global climate models have to be considered, at best, as approximations.

[SkepticLance]

To Peak Oil Man

 

I have to say it, though. Just found another reference to the fact that sea ice retreated far faster than models predicted.

 

http://nsidc.org/news/press/20070430_StroeveGRL.html

 

I quote :

 

"When the authors analyzed the IPCC computer model runs, they found that, on average, the models simulated a loss in September ice cover of 2.5 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006. The fastest rate of September retreat in any individual model simulation was 5.4 percent per decade. September marks the yearly minimum of sea ice in the Arctic. But newly available data sets, blending early aircraft and ship reports with more recent satellite measurements, show that the September ice actually declined at a rate of about 7.8 percent per decade during the 1953 to 2006 period.

 

"Because of this disparity, the shrinking of summertime ice is about thirty years ahead of the climate model projections," said NSIDC scientist and co-author Ted Scambos."

 

Of course, this was to a degree reversed by the colder than normal northern winter just gone.

 

http://vocalnation.net/posting/external/3599

[iNow]

I had this argument with iNow earlier, and I pointed out, that before this just gone northern winter, the global climate models had drastically underestimated Arctic sea ice melting.

 

Is that "drastically" on the metric system, or IU? My problem with you is the use of vague words to support absolute positions. Please, do tell us specifically which models are underestimating Artic Sea ice and offer the actual amount by which they differ from observation. If you are unable or unwilling, then you really shouldn't be making statements like that I quoted above.

[CaptainPanic]

SkepticLance provided a link to an article that contains data with units (metric). It also contains numbers on the relative decrease of the surface of the ice (percentage, not metric, imperial or SI... but dimensionless ).

 

I personally believe that the changing climate will not be a nice constant rise in temperature, equal all over the world. It seems to become more turbulent, so more ups and downs... with an average that seems to suggest that the trend is going towards warmer (plenty of links about that already on this forum, no need to add more).

[SkepticLance]

To CaptainPanic

 

To be fair to iNow, I think what happened was that he and I were typing a post and pressing 'submit' at almost the same time. I think he was responding to my post number 75, rather than number 77, which makes his reply (78) look inappropriate.