Here in California we listen very intently on what might be coming down the road re: automobiles. Like all of America, we love our cars. We bought so may hybrids that the car pool lanes are clogged with them. We are one of the lead testing grounds for electric only cars. Likewise for the fuell cell hydrogen cars.
The argument is that if we take those fossil-fuel cars off the road, then roughly HALF of the global warming gasses will go with them.
Sounds great on paper. This is what I wondered: take hydrogen fuel cell cars, for example. Estimates in America point to 125 Million to 150 Million cars on the road, here in the USA. Fuel cell cars supposedly only have water vapor, droplets, whatever, as an exhaust. Okay, what is going to happen to the atmosphere with 150 Million cars spewing water vapor into the atmosphere? I'm guessing there will be places with high humidity that have never seen humidity before. Maybe more cloudy days? Wet streets? Seriously, I'm wondering if anyone has stopped to think that soon enough, water vapor will start to become some kind of runaway pollutant.
And about electric cars. My house is on the electric grid. If me, and all my neighbors, had electric cars and we al charged them from home, wouldn't we need increased capacity to get that electricity to the house? Would the utility co's have to come out and put in new cables? Or would we just smoke the system that is here? And what happens when California's notoriously sketchy grid goes down? That's a lot of demand for electricity (which, btw, isn't growing on trees).
I'm not saying that we shouldn't move forward. I'm just wondering if 150 Million "solutions" won't cause their own kind of problems.
Eric
(author's note: at the time of this writing I have a Prius and, while it is a great car, it's not for everyone. There's no way you could replace a work truck with a Prius).
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3 comments:
Here's the realization I came to:
(I was thinking about wind-generated energy when I thought of this)
(Don't be too mad at yourself if you don't catch this the first time - it's really complex logic)
If the argument again fossil fuels is: We use so much energy we are changing our environment, then who's to say that putting up a sufficient number of windmills won't similarly change the environment?
Imagine a windmill farm, with the energy of the wind pushing agianst the props, each collision of an air molecule moving energy from the air to the prop. The air behind the prop MUST contain a little less energy than the air in front of it.
The question is this: HOW MUCH ENERGY IS STORED IN THE WORLD'S WIND? And what would happen if we used it? Would pollen not pollenate? Would waves stop crashing? Sexy models with the wind in their hair have to get real jobs?
Seriously, though, isn't the REAL question we should be asking: Where is the energy stored, and what is the most efficient form of energy? If it turns out that we'd have to use all the wind to power one rock concert, then we should know that!
In response to your question: Phoenix has gone from 2% humidity to 60% humidity due to pools and golf courses. If you don't think 150 million cars dripping water on the highway is worth thinking about, you're wrong!
Alex, that is EXACTLY what I was getting at. If you think about solar panels: free electricity, right? Renewable at least until we're extinct, right? But is there a remote possibility that sucking all that sunlight up and using it to power our needs will change the environment? I don't know, but based upon the HUGE numbers - I'm going to say, Yeah, probably.
Same with "clean coal" or hydroelectric. Some how, some day, once we've got hundreds of millions of people using the fuel, it will likely start to exhibit a cost.
I read an interesting and somewhat related story in the London Times: a researcher said that a human walking takes a lot of calories to move a distance. If that human fuels his walk with food, that food has to be grown somewhere. Wherever that food is grown and shipped to market, the energy/land/resources used to get that food in his belly far exceeds the amount of energy used by that same human driving to his destination because autos are much more efficient at using energy than a walking human.
We can summarize by saying: What is the most efficient way, with all costs considered, to do any given thing?
I'm surprised you can even have a marathon anymore since the destruction to the environment exceeds anything that folks out for a Sunday picnic do.
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