Air pollution rant

[nhnifong]

This has been my opinion over the past two years of cycling.

People who drive cars are...

24 months ago - Fellow citizens

18 months ago - People in an unfortunate predicament.

12 months ago - Inconsiderate and inattentive bums.

6 months ago - Lifeless scumbags

today - Fat, lazy, greedy sludge-guzzling planet murderers!

I'm sick of it!! when will the petroleum age end!? I don't want to smell it any more and I don't want to be in a city with other people who can't at least move from place to place under the strength of their own body! I'm sick of how it breed antisocial behavior and how it kills so many people all the time! But what drives me crazy more than anything is just the smell.

So I found out today that you can actually turn in the plate numbers of cars which are smoking and stinking to the police and they will make the owner go get their emissions inspected! ha! take that you inconsiderate 4-ton pickup driving gas-for-brains rednecks!

Edited October 24, 2013 by nhnifong

[Mr. Scruffy]

As much as i´d like to live long enough to see the age of the combustion engine end, i really need my car for my job. I am a meter reader in preferably (just because of cars, mostly) rural areas, and this cannot be done without car. And the one i use is a four-seater (6l Diesel / 100km), cause i inherited it, which i always drive alone. If nothing changes in my life, i´ll replace it with as small a car i can get, preferably silent running - promise.

(hope i sat back the clock for you by ~15 months)

[drakesdoom]

Wait 4-ton pickup? Where can I get one that big?

[Seret]

when will the petroleum age end!?

Short answer: in 52.9 years.

[source]

Long answer: At current levels of reserves and production, 52.9 years. This time would get longer if proven reserves went up, or production went down, and vice versa. In reality as reserves shrink the price will go up and this will restrict demand, so you could find that the R/P ratio stayed in the same 40-50 years range it's been hovering at for a while.

[Mr. Scruffy]

Rising prices will not only restict demand, they will also raise reserves - because fields that could not be economically exploited for a low price could for a high price.

[Seret]

Rising prices will not only restict demand, they will also raise reserves - because fields that could not be economically exploited for a low price could for a high price.

Trudat. You're already starting to see that with a lot of tertiary recovery and fun like fracking and tar sands that would have been considered silly before now becoming economical. I wouldn't be surprised to see us still slurping plenty of oil from all sorts of silly sources in a hundred years time.

[MC.STEEL]

Its very sad that something needs to push humanity almost off the edge of comfort before whe do something,whe cant even see farther than our noses because of our greed.

[running]

After we run out of oil, we'll start buring poo (or it's gasses) see how you like the smell of my 4-ton pickup then

Atleast the cities will get a more back to nature smell.

[Seret]

Its very sad that something needs to push humanity almost off the edge of comfort before whe do something,whe cant even see farther than our noses because of our greed.

Oh, we can see the problems coming alright. We just don't act until we have some incentive to do so.

[Vaebn]

When someone makes a rechargeable, non-exploding battery with the energy density of gasoline.

[Guest]

If the petroleum age ended today, how do you plan on getting food to the market? That's seriously going to take a lot of horse and buggies. Imagine the smell then.

[Vaebn]

Pneumatic tubes.

[razark]

If the petroleum age ended today, how do you plan on getting food to the market?

That won't be a problem. Without the petrochemical industry, there won't be much food production anyway.

[palker]

If the petroleum age ended today, how do you plan on getting food to the market? That's seriously going to take a lot of horse and buggies. Imagine the smell then.

There was a nice chapter in SuperFreakonomics about times before cars were common and horse dung was everywhere.

[Drunkrobot]

Hydrogen fuel cell cars. Running on Hydrogen, which we could rather easily get from water, it performs some SCIENCE, and produces water vapour and an electic current to drive moters in the wheels. No noise, no fumes, and many cars that have been built intended for sale (Honda Clarity, for example) has the range and quick servicing of petroleum cars (96km per kilogram of Hydrogen, wikipedia tells me). If it wern't for the lack of noise, you could be convinced that you were still in those big, comfy gas-guzzlers.

The fuel cell technology is scaleable as well, so motorbikes and vans, lorries and buses can be run on H as well.

And to those who think the infrastructure needed is too exspensive, then you need to consider how many trillions are needed to keep the oil industry going, and how a big chunk of that money is saved by making petroleum transport obsolete.

Edited October 24, 2013 by Drunkrobot

[Jones-250]

What annoys me the most are drivers who are alone in their car. A gridlock with, lets say, a hundred cars could easyly fit in one or two darn buses! So there I am, tired after work, sitting on the bus stop. Counting cars passing by, wondering how many of them carry only one person. Lorries, delivery vans and other "more useful" vehicles excluded, naturally. Traffic acts a bit like a gas. The more you give space to it, the more roads and parking lots you build, the more space it´ll take. And the other way around... If I remeber correctly, Seoul fixed some of its traffic jams by tearing down a highway and restoring the river hidden below it.

[ZedNova]

I feel bad about it, but there's no other way to travel the distances from home to work out here, I have to drive 30 miles every day to get there.

[Seret]

Hydrogen fuel cell cars.

Possibly, but I'm inclined to think that if they were going to take off, they already would have.

The fuel cells are expensive, as long as they need platinum group metals they'll remain so. And the hydrogen itself has issues. We've already got a gas infrastructure, but methane is much easier to handle than hydrogen. Hydrogen either needs to be stored at extremely high pressures, or extremely low temperatures. Both of those add further cost. There are also issues in using it for aircraft, given it's low energy density per unit volume. All the hydrogen aircraft designed to date have ended up being pretty bulbous, which is not efficient for most uses.

But the real issue is that almost all currently available hydrogen is made from reformed fossil fuels, so isn't a particularly clean or sustainable fuel. It can be made be electrolysing water, but that in itself is very energy intensive, so isn't a great solution to an energy problem. If the grid electricity you're using to make your hydrogen isn't squeeky clean then you're back to square one, especially given the low energy efficiency of the conversion process. You may have zero emissions at the tailpipe, but the goal is lower emissions overall. I don't hold much hope in large-scale CCS making centralised production of hydrogen for transport use any cleaner than burning oil.

[Rage097]

Pros of cars:

-Speedy transit to a destination.

-Economic stuff that I'd rather not discuss due to its tendency to turn into politics

-If one gets in a wreck, the larger the vehicle, the safer you'll be normally.

Cons:

-traffic

-Air pollution

-Paranoid Enviromentalists making a government have a bigger budget for expensive 'green' technology than space travel.

-people tend to misuse their vehicles

-unsafe in a wreck (if you're in a smartcar)

-We'll run out of fuel eventually.

I think that the assumption that car drivers are 'planet murderers' is paranoid and misled. I am fairly certain most drivers aren't INTENTIONALLY TRYING to kill the planet. That and a bicyclists in front of a car is very annoying. especially when the rider cannot reach the speed limit.

[Seret]

-If one gets in a wreck, the larger the vehicle, the safer you'll be normally.

Crash test ratings don't support this assertion. What matters are the way the car is designed and what safety features it incorporates, not how big it is. Larger cars (or at least those that are higher at the front) are significantly more dangerous to pedestrians in a collision.

[Rage097]

Crash test ratings don't support this assertion. What matters are the way the car is designed and what safety features it incorporates, not how big it is. Larger cars (or at least those that are higher at the front) are significantly more dangerous to pedestrians in a collision.

True. and by wreck, I mean car-to-car. and safer for the DRIVER. But I will agree that I should've been more specific by 'larger'. But larger vehicles would be safer for a driver than say, a smart-car, correct?

[Seret]

But larger vehicles would be safer for a driver than say, a smart-car, correct?

No, a larger vehicle that's less well engineered for a crash could be less safe than a Smart Car. The Smart City Coupe gets a (not particularly good) NCAP rating of 3 stars for the driver, but you really don't have to look far among larger vehicles to find many considerably worse (Chrysler Voyager 1 star, Kia Carnival 2 stars, Citroen Nemo 1 star, Jeep Compass 2 stars, etc, etc)

If you lokk at the cars that score the top ratings, they represent a range of sizes. There is no correlation between size and safety.

Edited October 24, 2013 by Seret

[drakesdoom]

Crash test ratings don't support this assertion. What matters are the way the car is designed and what safety features it incorporates, not how big it is. Larger cars (or at least those that are higher at the front) are significantly more dangerous to pedestrians in a collision.

What holds true is if a heavier vehicle is in a wreck striking a lighter vehicle the occupants of the heavier vehicle will be safer. If that vehicle hits an even heavier object (bridge support, tree) or rolls over it stops being so safe.

No, a larger vehicle that's less well engineered for a crash could be less safe than a Smart Car. The Smart City Coupe gets a (not particularly good) NCAP rating of 3 stars for the driver, but you really don't have to look far among larger vehicles to find many considerably worse (Chrysler Voyager 1 star, Kia Carnival 2 stars, Citroen Nemo 1 star, Jeep Compass 2 stars, etc, etc)

If you lokk at the cars that score the top ratings, they represent a range of sizes. There is no correlation between size and safety.

For starters NCAP ratings are for an impact on immovable barriers, they are also grouped by year and vehicle class. A 5 star compact is not necessarily better than a 5 star sedan, also a '93 5 star is not as good as a 2013 5star.

Edited October 24, 2013 by drakesdoom

[Seret]

For starters NCAP ratings are for an impact on immovable barriers, they are also grouped by year and vehicle class. A 5 star compact is not necessarily better than a 5 star sedan, also a '93 5 star is not as good as a 2013 5star.

True, it's an imperfect measure. But I still think that the safety features and design of a vehicle influence it's crashworthiness more than size. There are plenty of large vehicles out there that are not very crashworthy. I can understand why people might assume larger, sturdier-looking vehicles might be better, but improving crash performance isn't about adding more metal to a design. The energies in even quite modest crashes make that approach pointless.

[drakesdoom]

True, it's an imperfect measure. But I still think that the safety features and design of a vehicle influence it's crashworthiness more than size. There are plenty of large vehicles out there that are not very crashworthy. I can understand why people might assume larger, sturdier-looking vehicles might be better, but improving crash performance isn't about adding more metal to a design. The energies in even quite modest crashes make that approach pointless.

This is why they think bigger is better.