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aircon, diesel, green electric cars, hybrid cars, lubricants, nuclear power, paints, tyres, zero emissions
You can’t. It’s as simple as that. Harsh but true.
Drive a diesel, because it’s more fuel efficient? Fine and dandy. Just remember that even with the exhaust scrubbers and convertors, diesels chuck out lots of polycyclic hydrocarbons. These sound nasty, and indeed they are. They’re as carcinogenic as all get out.
A hybrid? Bully for you. But see my later comments about electric cars.
Looking forward to hydrogen powered cars, because all they emit is water? Well, that’s true, but it’s a classic NSTAAFL. There’s not much hydrogen around (unsurprisingly, since it’s highly reactive, which is why it burns), so it’s produced by electrolysing water. Electrolysis needs electricity. This is produced by power stations, and they burn coal or gas or shale oil, or whatever. Unless they’re nuclear powered, which isn’t very green at all. Also hydrogen isn’t very calorific, so you need to burn a lot of it to get a decent head of steam up, as it were.
Electric cars. Gotta be good news, eh? Zero emissions? Nope, not so. They don’t emit anything, but they too need electricity, and again NSTAAFL. All that happens is the emissions are a long way away from the car.
Electric cars need batteries, and even modern batteries are heavy for the amount of power they can store. A gallon of petrol weighs about 9 lb, and contains a heck of a lot more energy than a similar weight battery. So they need to put a lot of batteries in a car to carry enough energy to get it to go a decent distance at a reasonable speed. The cars will therefore tend to be heavy.
The manufacturers get round this by making the rest of the vehicle as light as possible. Aluminium is the weapon of choice here, and that metal consumes prodigious quantities of energy (electricity) during smelting. There’s also a lot of use of composites, or plastics in everyday language. Those are made from petroleum. No other feedstock for plastics is viable just at the moment.
The batteries themselves are full of toxic metals. These metals are derived from ore, and mining and refining ores, let alone smelting, is a filthy process. It requires thousands of gallons of water per tonne of metal, and the run-off and tails are seriously toxic, because they contain other heavy metals whose concentration is sharply increased by the processing. Then when a battery reaches the end of its life, what do you do with it? You can recycle some of it, yes, but a lot of it is simply defunct. How do you dispose of all that toxic crap? Beats me.
Then there’s simple things such as the cables to carry your clean energy round your zero emissions vehicle. The best metal for making cables is, for a variety of reasons, copper. There’s miles of cable in even a small car. Have you ever been anywhere near a copper mine/smelter? I have. Nothing grows for miles and miles around. Nothing.
There’s also the thorny problem of items such as tyres. They’re a swine to dispose of or recycle. Lubricants. Horrible things. Dust from brakes? Don’t breathe too much of that. Got aircon? Shame on you. All aircon systems leak refrigerants, and they’re all either greenhouse gases, or they cane the ozone layer, or both. Even that rather fetching special edition paint finish is made from oil.
In conclusion, if you think you’re smart, and feel smug about your zero emissions vehicle, then don’t. It’s better than an 8 mpg gas guzzler, but it’s not as clear-cut as you think.
nobodysreadingme 
Bravo, Dunc, make us think harder!
I’m not bible thumping here, but those smug buggers who think it’s holier than thou to drive hybrids really get on my nerves.
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Just read it out loud to someone…
Thank you. Not a smug bugger I trust? Don’t want to upset anyone, clearly.
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I could not agree more. The disposing of the batteries is going to kill us all.
Quite possibly, but old age will carry me off first, methinks.
Chilli,
Bicycles, hiking to work and telecommuting seemed to be taking root in Seattle some years ago. Any idea how strategies like this are advancing? Definitely not obvious in Miami.
Please don’t say anything about Motorcycles……it might hurt Kimmie Lou’s feelings.
RR
I’m not telling folk not to drive, just telling them not to be smug about what they drive.
Thanks for this, Nobodys.
While I am pleased that people have the intent of being better for the environment, they often forget just how much goes into making “green” cars…You’re correct: the pollutants are simply farther away, not gone.
Cars may be an impossibility when it comes to being green, but one could still help the environment. Getting solar panels for your yard/home, recycling, committing to highway cleanup projects, getting on lawmakers to reduce factory emissions and volunteering at local greenhouse events can all be good choices.
No argument. As I’ve said in a nu,mber of comments, I’m aware that life is tricky without a car, and if you do drive, that’s not a mortal sin. But don’t bang on about how environmentally aware you are just cos you drive a hybrid.
I always thought driving a green car would be the same as driving a blue car, or a brown car or a silver car 😉
Seriously though, food for thought
What does NSTAAFL mean?
No such thing as a free lunch.
I wondered when someone would ask that
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I guess everyone else bar me knew the meaning 😛
It’s more likely they just assumed it was some arcane piece of nonsense from me and let it go.
NOT true, Mr. Fluffy, NOT true. Have you ever watched ‘Bugsy Malone’? They drive green cars. If everyone drove cars like those, everyone could drive with a much better conscience. I guess it doesn’t solve the tire problem altogether, but the driving part would be entirely green. And really good for your health. 😛
Like the Flintstones. that would work too.
Nice to see you again, Lola. Your guestblog was a big hit.
Yeah, or the flintstones. Though I think pedals would be kind of cool. 😉 Nice to see you, too. Happy to hear my guestblog went well! I totally missed out on my five minutes of fame because I had some, well, issues preventing me from going online. Just like me to miss my spotlight. But I’m back online, even blogged today, and will now go and check my guestblog out! 🙂
Good news. I’ll pop over and have a look right now
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Cool, thanks! 😀
Been there done that designed the tee shirt.
ooh, a t-shirt, that rocks. Meanwhile I’m over at my five minutes of fame, replying. Better late than never, eh?
I’ve been criticized by this here author for being smug. He inferred that, I guess, from what he presumes about generic drivers of electric cars. We’ve never met, though. I don’t feel smug, but who knows? Duncan, I guess.
I do feel fortunate, though, to live in the Pacific Northwest of the US where most of our power is hydroelectric. And wind. And a little nuclear. I’m well aware of the facts regarding aluminum smelting and battery production; and I look forward to the inevitable progress in batteries, when they’ll be cheaper, lighter, and more capable of storage. Same with the energy used in manufacturing of all things. There’s enough beaming down on us from the sun and blowing by us in the wind that the day will arrive — if we live that long — when use of carbon for energy will be long gone. If for no other reason than its supply isn’t endless. More importantly, of course, because of the damage it’s doing, acknowledged pretty much everywhere on the planet except in the red parts of my country.
So, yeah, I get some pleasure out of knowing I’m not producing carbon emissions from my car. It’s a start on the road everyone will be taking some time; too far in the future for me but, hopefully, not too far for my about-to-be-born grandson.
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The reality is the greenest car you can drive is a 10 year old low mileage gently used and well maintained compact car. That you keep parked in your driveway for emergency travel. This is because the carbon off-set for the manufacturing has already been paid for…and not driving is really green.
Hydrogen Fuel cell cars are a future potential if they can optimize the solar-cell hydrolysis process – but that has been on the “coming soon” table for about 20 years now. Wrote my honours thesis for my Environment and Resource Studies degree on that topic. It is the same process that powers much of the Space Station – but you need really big Solar Panels…
I get into the same “bottled water” debate with my eco-friends. They tell me bottled water isn’t green and bottled water should be banned! And then I point out what happens when you ban bottled water – people buy other beverages instead. The plastic bottles will still be there – they just won’t be from water bottles. And apparently most other beverages are mostly water – yet somehow they are more green than bottled water? Huh. The problem isn’t bottled water; it is the fact that people are lazy and want a convenient inexpensive drink. Solve that problem and you will make bottled water disappear in an instant.
Keep going Duncan – keep doing the reality check on the green machine!
I have no argument at all with the idea of being green, making the world safer and cleaner. But I do object to people being smug.
And i really object to being called a troll simply because I have a different opinion from somebody else. I had a furious firefight last week where somebody DEMANDED I apologise for a rather innocuous comment that wasn’t even directed at her. I told her hell would freeze over before I apologised for simply disagreeing. She got on her highhorse and asked her Internet pals to support her in her demand. To theit credit they all just ignored her.
But I find it an increasing problem. Disagree, you’re a troll. I think that attitude is bollocks
Critical thinking seems to be a lost art 🙂
Not at this end.
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Smug?
I don’t think it smug to have an opinion and be prepared to defend it
Agree 98.6% Which is what I did.
Good. So we agree. Let’s not fall out here
Cool. Heading back to ReadWave, humbly.
Are you sure? 🙂
I assume you’re not referring to me when you say you hate being called a troll, since I never did. Same, I’ll presume, with regard to the reply to your response, about critical thinking. I think I covered my perspective critically, above. OTOH I assume we’d all agree that discussions, if that’s what they are, on internet fora quickly degenerate into name-calling and worse. And “degenerate” might not be the right description, since to degenerate they’d have to start on a higher plane than most do.
My problem, which isn’t apparent in this thread since my original essay to which Duncan responded rather tersely and insultingly appeared elsewhere, but did refer back to his essay here, was an assumption that I was smug and didn’t know the complexities of the “green” issues. I don’t disagree with most of what Duncan wrote here, and I think I implied that above.
Interestingly, as I wrote in that invisible essay, my prior car was 20 years old and had 254,000 miles on it when I finally sold it. I bought it used, with 20,000 miles on it. Before that, I had a car I bought new, but also kept for 20 years and more than 200,000 miles. I also had a Ford Bronco for a while, which I bought with 175,000 miles on it and added another 10 before giving it to the local tech school, like donating a body.
As I wrote, getting a Tesla was as against type for me in as many ways as is possible.
Thought you might be interested in this statement from Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors. In a recent press conference, he stated that “The company has analyzed energy usage in production process and claims energy payback happens in less than 10,000 miles. May release white paper on this soon.”
I have no idea about methodology, but it’s an interesting data point in the discussion here.
OK, let’s see what it says. But I stand by my original point. There is no such thing as an emissions free vehicle. Somewhere along the line, if you want to power a vehicle, the power has to come from somewhere. Power stations produce power, and the pollute. Therefore the vehicle can look 100% clean in your neighbourhood, but the poor buggers downwind of the power station think otherwise
Agreed. But, as I said above, there are non-polluting forms of energy, and the sooner we switch to them, the better. In the Pacific Northwest, most energy is hydro and wind, and many people are installing solar at their homes, powering both their homes and electric cars entirely. And if it’s true that energy costs of production are recovered well within the lifetime of electric cars, then the environment is better off. I assume you’d agree. There’s no such point in the continued use of internal combustion engines; they’ll continue to pollute as long as you drive them; and, for many of them, the longer they’re driven the more inefficient and polluting they become. You’ve seen those egregious older cars spewing choking smoke while their driver either don’t care, or can’t afford to have the engines rebuilt.
I don’t think the fact that there are emissions involved in the production of electric cars or, in many parts of the world, the “fueling” of them can be considered an argument for the continued use of fossil fuels. It’d be interesting to know — and maybe the info is out there somewhere — whether there are significantly more emissions in the production of electric cars than in gas cars; and if so, whether there’s a point at which the lifetime emissions in driving one or the other for, say, 100,000 miles favors electric ones.
The argument isn’t whether, or when, electric cars are or will be literally “zero emissions.” It’s whether the planet would be better off if everyone were driving electric cars. The answer seems obvious to me, in favor of electric. But even if I’m wrong about that, the time will come when there’s no option to continue using gas. If I were a smug sort of person, or, perhaps, a thinker of justifiable thoughts, I’d say people switching to electric this early in the game are helping to drive and to fund the evolution of the required technologies; to justify the money invested in such research.