trees said:
Grouch, very well written response and good references for your point of view,
Thank you but your subsequent questions indicate you did not read any of the references.
trees said:
Just a couple of questions to consider: How many hydro electric plants are going up to harness the power of stored water?
I don't know and don't care. This is a tangential argument not relevant to
alternative fuel hotrodding, in general, and electric vehicle hotrodding,
specifically. Electricity is available cheaply and cleanly.
trees said:
How many Nuc. power plants are under construction? How are we going to deal with nuclear wastes?
Don't know. Not relevant to either electric vehicle use nor alternative
fuel hotrodding. Nuclear power plants are just one of many ways to
generate electricity. They are not essential for electric cars. On the
other hand, there are very few alternatives to fossil fuels to power
internal combustion engines.
trees said:
How are we going to deal with nuclear wastes? How are Japan and European countries dealing with their wastes?
What does this have to do with alternative fuel hotrodding? Another straw man argument. Three mile island kinda dampened the enthusiasm for nuclear power in the U.S.
trees said:
How many people are screaming for those giant wind generators to be installed in their neigberhood?
Again, this is not relevant. I suspect not many people are screaming for the
giant wind generators to be installed in their neighborhoods, which is why all of those windmill farms are in hilly, remote, unpopulated regions.
trees said:
What is the ratio of TVA Hydro Electric Power Plants to the Fossil Fuel Powered plants and why is it so close?
What is the point? How is this relevant to alternative fuel hotrodding? Are
you trying to suggest that the large scale generation of electricity is less
efficient and therefore more wasteful and polluting than hundreds of millions of cars with engines averaging about 20% efficiency? If so, that is ludicrous on the face of it.
trees said:
How many acres of land is available to grow enough crops to provide the quantity of Ethanol to satisfy the demand if Ethanol were to be mandated (over and above what is required to meet our nationl food supplies)?
Who is doing this mandating and why are they so stupid?
trees said:
How much increased engery demands and polution is generated when all this agriculture activity spools up? (our depleted soils require tons of chemicals and pesticides to produce in quantity and big time fossil fuel guzzling equiptment to conduct the operation)
Now you're stacking up a whole platoon of straw men so you can knock them down. You're the one who came up with the wild ideas that (a) a single magic solution must be found, (b) no single magic solution is available, (c) choosing ethanol as the single magic solution would deplete the soil, (d) depleting the soil by the production of crops to produce a mandated magic solution of ethanol will damage our ability to feed ourselves, (e) producing enough ethanol to be the single magic solution will require lots of petroleum consumption.
trees said:
Basically,in the enegery field, there are too much of the equations of computing gains and losses ignored and very errorenous decisions/claims being made based on "feel good" results.
What claims have I made that are erroneous? Where are these "feel good" results? Where are you getting this, er, *stuff*?
trees said:
Its been a long time since I studied/practiced thermo dynamics, but can not forget one basic rule drilled into my thick head: Matter can not be created or destroyed, we can only change it's form and to do that it takes or gives off enegery. To solve or predict processes, you have to correctly define the process and account for all events in the process. Enviromental freaks that I refer to have no clue or chose to ignore thes facts to justify their favorite agendas. That is why I stated that hydrogen is not the answer to our enegry needs.
The problem with hydrogen based fuel cells for cars has nothing to do with thermodynamics. It's a matter of distribution. There is no fuel distribution network in place that is comparable to the one that exists for gasoline and diesel fuels. The electricity distribution network is the only energy-related one that is comparable. It actually is much more wide-spread making electricity much easier to obtain and many more distribution outlets than gasoline, but it fails to be anywhere near as easy to haul large quantities away from those outlets.
No thermodynamics study nor physics degree is needed to understand that problem. You can haul a lot of energy around with you in the form of gasoline or diesel fuel. You can haul so much of it around so easily that it is not even a major inconvenience that your engine will throw away around 70% to 80% of the energy actually stored in your gas tank.
Your use of the word "thermodynamics" does nothing to validate your pseudo-science.
trees said:
Production of lead acid batteries is a bigtime poluter of both the air and soil/water and even though recycling occurs, big time polution there as well.
That's just plain old bovine fertilizer. Toss that on those corn fields with the depleted soils and you might just have bumper crops large enough to mandate corn whiskey as the single magic solution to energy problems.
There is more lead pollution from oil changes (you know, those things required by our internal combustion engines?) than from batteries. I can't bring myself to believe that the production of plastic cases for batteries and the assembly of those batteries will use more fossil fuels, and at a lower efficiency, than all of the internal combustion engines belching along at their typical 20% to 34% (for racing engines) efficiency.
trees said:
Now you want to expand that operation (assuming electric vehicles use lead acid batteries). What is the net savings in polution and fossil fuel?
Pretty darned big. According to a report in 1997 from the California Air
Resources Board:
"Between 1978 and 1987, the phase-out of leaded gasoline had cut its use
by 90 percent and reduced the overall inventory of airborne lead by
nearly 95 percent."
"Currently, aircraft fuel is the primary source of inorganic lead
emissions contributing about 149 tons of the metal to the state's lead
inventory each year. The next largest source of inorganic lead is metal
melting facilities which emit about 6 tons of inorganic lead to
California's air per year."
(Source =
http://www.arb.ca.gov/newsrel/nr042497.htm )
Hmmm. That is just one state, yet the ratio of airborne lead pollution from ONE type of fossil fuel versus the lead pollution from ALL metal melting facilities is still 149 to 6. Now I'm no math whiz, but it sure looks like there's room in that ratio for a whole lot more battery production, even assuming the 1997 emissions hold today, while still reducing overall pollution.
Ok, so everyone knows California is a land of aliens (sorry, Californians, if nobody has pointed out this popular belief to you before). Let's see what the governments of the U.S. and Canada had to say, also in 1997, when they signed an agreement concerning air pollution:
"Alkyl-lead is released to the environment primarily through evaporative emissions from unburned gasoline retained in an engine's carburetor or fuel tanks and through evaporative losses during the filling of gasoline tanks, accidental spillages, and releases during production. However, alkyl-lead compounds combine with other compounds during the combustion process to form inorganic lead halides that are subsequently emitted as microparticulates in exhaust. Therefore, the human exposure pathways for alkyl-lead include inhalation of leaded gasoline vapors and dermal exposure to leaded gasoline. Unlike metallic forms of lead, alkyl-lead is easily absorbed through the skin. Additionally, the lead halides exhausted through combustion can be inhaled. Subsequent deposition of these lead halides contributes to exposure to lead through ingestion of lead contaminated soil or dust, and ingestion of lead-contaminated food or water.
"The use of alkyl-lead has been prohibited by legislation in on-road automotive gasoline, however, several authorized uses of alkyl-lead still remain. Currently, the largest use of alkyl-lead occurs in aviation gasoline for general aviation (piston-engine) aircraft. In 1998, the aviation industry used approximately 295.3 million gallons of leaded gasoline, which is estimated to contain 1.39 million pounds of TEL [tetraethyllead]. Other uses of alkyl-lead include automotive racing gasoline, and recreational marine fuel. These current uses, as well as trace amounts of lead in automotive gasoline, result in releases to the environment."
(Source =
http://www.epa.gov/grtlakes/bns/lead/steplead.html )
Oops! Metallic lead, such as that in lead-acid batteries, is not easily absorbed, while organo-lead compounds are easily absorbed. Oops, again! The primary source of those compounds is our friend, the internal combustion engine.
trees said:
I am still looking for an article written by a reputable Thermo Dynamicist that has addressed these issues extensively and balanced the equations that paints a totally different "big picture" than the arm chair enviromentalist with a PHD in Social Engineering with a back ground of science and math that stopped at Algebra I and Science in high school. If I find it, I will post or link it.
I hope you find that article and it doesn't turn out to be one from some place like contrail.com. It would be nice if you would identify the "arm chair enviromentalist", now that you've given his/her credentials so very specifically. Since you have given no facts and no reference sources to support your claims, I must conclude that you're just trolling for arguments and I've been reeled in.
I've presented facts which are verifiable from multiple sources ranging from advocates of electric vehicles to governments and scientists. You've presented claims without any foundations.
The big question I have is not whether electricity production, storage (in chemical form as in batteries), hauling and use will result in higher rates of depletion of fossil fuels or higher pollution; those are false concerns easily dispelled by available facts. What I want to know is why there is an assumption that hotrodding cannot exist without a gasoline-burning, inefficient piston engine?
Certainly, a lot of the gains in performance of factory produced vehicles since World War II can be at least partially attributed to those factories' response to the popularity of hotrods. The pony cars, sports cars and muscle cars trace their roots ot hotrodders. You can see the influence of hotrodders in the style of many cars being produced today. I see no reason whatsoever for hotrodders to dry up and blow away just because the propulsion system changes. Every possible drive mechanism out there will be tinkered with and improved upon by hotrodders. Somebody will just have to make it go faster, turn quicker, stop shorter and cause the spectators to make 'ooo' and 'ahhh' noises while doing so.