George Monbiot's Latest Silliness
I'll be getting from Venice to downtown LA on my elephant. You? https://t.co/K1ghzWcGLf
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) March 7, 2019
George Monbiot's Latest Silliness
I'll be getting from Venice to downtown LA on my elephant. You? https://t.co/K1ghzWcGLf
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) March 7, 2019
I'm teleporting these days. Though being ripping into lots of atomic sized pieces is a bit painful. And you absolutely have to remember to put everything back where you found it (livers don't work so well when they are backwards).
Ben at March 7, 2019 7:00 AM
Elephants are good if you need lots of trunk space.
Adam at March 7, 2019 7:02 AM
The exhaust of all those elephants could be an issue for large urban areas, especially during rush hour.
bkmale at March 7, 2019 7:26 AM
Ah, but think of all the jobs those elephants will create! Myself, I'll go with either a chariot, or perhaps a litter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_(vehicle)
I can put this on the bumper of my chariot: My other car is a litter
I R A Darth Aggie at March 7, 2019 7:40 AM
Anyone who advocates you get rid of your car does not have children. Stand outside the grocery and watch someone with kids come out with 2 kids and a cart full of stuff and tell me how they could take the bus. Or go to Home Depot and watch people load up large items in their car to go fix up their house. On the bus? Some of those so proud of themselves live in NYC and take Uber...which are cars.
I've also seen such people proclaiming that we use too much toilet paper. Such ideas stink.
cc at March 7, 2019 8:25 AM
They worked for this guy.
JD at March 7, 2019 8:57 AM
If, in ten years, they come up with a better alternative, I'm all for it.
We have the means to make hydrogen cell cars with emissions of nothing but water. But they are kept off the market because oil tycoons don't want their influx of cash to dry up.
Patrick at March 7, 2019 9:16 AM
I seriously hope you are joking Patrick. Us oil tycoon aren't that powerful anymore.
Ben at March 7, 2019 9:54 AM
Getting rid of cars isn't going to happen anytime soon, but it would certainly help if: (1) more cars were electric or hybrids instead of gas-only and (2) the appetite for lower mpg gas-only SUVs wasn't so insatiable.
NYT: The World Is Embracing SUVs. That’s Bad News for the Climate.
JD at March 7, 2019 10:49 AM
Let's start the back-to-the-mud-huts social destruction with some self-righteous SJW bullshittery.
I'll go first:
Only Nazis don't ride-share.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 7, 2019 1:03 PM
But public transportation is magical! All you have to do is click your heels three times and say: "There no place like Century City..."
Cousin Dave at March 7, 2019 2:10 PM
Big Mac says fuggit.
Crid at March 7, 2019 2:32 PM
✔ Adam at March 7, 2019 7:02 AM
Crid at March 7, 2019 2:51 PM
"We have the means to make hydrogen cell cars with emissions of nothing but water. But they are kept off the market because oil tycoons don't want their influx of cash to dry up."
Do you mean fuel-cell electrics, or H2 burners? If the latter, umm, no. I ran a Treadwell 7L16 O2 generator on both subs I was on. It turns out that electrolysis, the method suited to disassemble H2O into its parts to recover the oxygen, has a BIG energy requirement. You may note that such a machine produces twice the volume of hydrogen than it does oxygen; the same principle applies.
Study heat engines for any amount of time and you notice that the internal combustion engine throws more heat out the tailpipe than it uses to propel the car. Pollutants are reduced, but not energy waste, if H2 is used in current engine designs.
For the fuel cell, durability in the face of vibration and complexity are an issue still. Peak power is limited by membrane area; you will note that this reference states that a "stack" is required to develop useful voltage.
We once thought that nothing could replace the horse and buggy. Postwar American car markets produced very bad habits, in that structures far larger and heavier than needed were built to move people. Now, we have an economic model that will NOT reward any car builder for making a car durable.
There is considerable protest about government mandates, yet these were overcome. Once, you could not breathe in LA, and the first attempts at smog reduction produced the spectacle of a Corvette with a rompin', stompin' 140HP 5-liter V-8.
Now the Corvette easily makes over 400HP, can get nearly 30MPG on the cruise control and emits far less.
And don't drag-race a Tesla. You'll lose.
Once the opportunities for graft are exhausted (SWIDT?), you'll see the electric car shine. A 150HP electric motor makes about 600lb-ft of torque. You won't be emasculated for driving one.
Radwaste at March 7, 2019 4:26 PM
Personally, I'm looking forward to the elimination of engine-powered SHIPS. It will be great to have lots of beautiful square-rigged sailing ships again.
Only thing is, where will we get the people to haul on the lines? Not the kind of work that very many SWJs would be interested in, I'm thinking. Guess it's more Jobs Americans Won't Do, and we'll need to get a lot more immigrants.
David Foster at March 7, 2019 5:17 PM
That's weird. Most ships worldwide aren't registered in the USA or crewed by Americans.
Sailing? You can forget scheduling AND the shipment of refrigerated stores. You're not going to wait for a train to deliver your binky in the USA, you want a truck, and right now, so I suspect you'll be disappointed by waiting for the weather to deliver your purchase.
Maybe some of us don't know what's at sea right now. Here's a view of commercial traffic off Dubai, and you can look anywhere else you'd like.
Radwaste at March 7, 2019 5:29 PM
Dood… THIS is the candy shop.
Makes Long Beach look like paddle boats on a Minneapolis lake.
Crid at March 7, 2019 6:06 PM
"That's weird. Most ships worldwide aren't registered in the USA or crewed by Americans."
Doesn't matter. AOC and her crew won't allow them to dock at American ports.
Possibly they could dock in Mexico or Canada, and then the goods could be transported to destinations in the US via mule-drawn wagons...oh, I forgot, that's another technology that won't be allowed---methane emissions, don't you know.
David Foster at March 7, 2019 7:41 PM
"I'll be getting from Venice to downtown LA on my elephant. You?"
"Who told you about my elephant?" - Paul Lynde
Radwaste at March 7, 2019 9:02 PM
"Once, you could not breathe in LA, and the first attempts at smog reduction produced the spectacle of a Corvette with a rompin', stompin' 140HP 5-liter V-8.
Now the Corvette easily makes over 400HP, can get nearly 30MPG on the cruise control and emits far less."
Yeah, I remember those awful days of the early '70s... But the goal of the environmentalists was not to clean up L.A. smog. It was to price the automobile out of range of the middle class. They were foiled by two things they didn't see coming: (1) the Japanese manufacturers, and (2) electronic engine management. The reason we have that 400HP Vette now is because of the microprocessor.
As for the Tesla, all of what you say is true... the killer there is, as always, the batteries. They have gotten incrementally better since the GM EV-1, but the basic principle is still the same. The problem with current electric vehicles is that, unless you never travel outside of the confines of your own town, you still need a gasoline-powered car as a backup and long-distance transport. Everybody has been waiting for a battery revolution for 30 years, and it doesn't appear that there will be one. Some other energy-storage technology is going to be needed.
(As an aside: If that energy-storage technology does come along, that changes the calculus for renewable energy generation, particularly wind power. The effective usefulness of a wind farm goes way up if you have a few thousand megawatt-hours of energy storage handy.)
Cousin Dave at March 8, 2019 7:24 AM
It makes it more viable Cousin Dave. Doesn't mean they will be playing on a level playing field. All the renewables have to have exemptions from environmental laws to operate. You should see all the stuff us oil guys have to do so there are zero bird deaths involved with drilling. Take away their exemption and wind farms would have to close. Solar thermal too. Photovoltaics are mostly imported to avoid environmental regs too.
That green stuff aint so green once you look into it.
Ben at March 8, 2019 9:06 AM
Ben, yes... there are lots of other problems. In addition to the wind farms (not only do they kill birds, but the birds they kill are mostly raptors), but environmentalists are starting to realize that solar farms take up a ton of land and that they destroy habitat on the land they occupy. Honestly, I don't see renewables ever becoming more than 20% (at the far extreme) of America's energy supply. As I tell people: If you say you're serious about climate change, but you oppose nuclear power, then you aren't serious about climate change.
Cousin Dave at March 8, 2019 11:58 AM
"Sailing? You can forget scheduling AND the shipment of refrigerated stores. "
But give me a fast ship and a seasoned crew and I'll bring back spices and silks the likes o' which you've ne'er seen.
Argh.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at March 8, 2019 12:29 PM
Paul Lynde joke!
The thing about Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly was that they were fucking subversive in a totally 1960's-counterculture way, even if you were too young to know precisely what was going on when you were home from school watching a teevee game show.
Things are better now, indisputably. Much better to be out and accepted in a pompously contemporary community than closeted and often threatened in the socially uneven days of yor.
But those guy were an electrically reliable connection to sophisticated society in Hollywood, and in turn, backward in fashionable Western Civ through the centuries. There have always been cultures that shared life with gays for who they were, whatever the pretensions required around magistrates and clergy…
And SJWs are not just wrong, but trite in imagining themselves as heroically cosmopolitan in such matters. ESPECIALLY in erotic considerations.
No. They're children blowing snot.
Crid at March 8, 2019 8:57 PM
✔ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers
at March 8, 2019 12:29 PM
Crid at March 8, 2019 9:01 PM
> The reason we have that
> 400HP Vette now is because
> of the microprocessor
If we ever meet for beer, there'll be some talk about that… I have the soft, clean hands of a guy who's never done more for a car than adding the windshield fluid. But after a deep wikipedia dive on the almost mythically beloved V8, I asked a motoring friend why the older cars with it seem not to have notably greater power, and he said the same thing you did: Engine electronics.
Crid at March 8, 2019 9:20 PM
Had a BMW 540i a few years ago. The car had a 4.5 Liter (274ci) engine with a 6-speed stick shift. In 3rd gear at 3,200 RPM, that thing had power on demand - just press the gas pedal and hold on.
Surprisingly maneuverable for so large a car, it reminded me of my old Miata in terms of handling - but to get any decent throttle response from the Miata's then rather anemic 4-cylinder, I had to run the engine at the red line. The Bimmer, on the other hand, had power to spare.
If you get a chance to drive a V8 mated to a good transmission, I strongly recommend it. Doing so in a maneuverable car will enhance the experience greatly.
Conan the Grammarian at March 9, 2019 1:22 PM
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