[Raion]

Easy with the flippancy, I didn't want to spark this for this reason. Let's all get back to the focus.

[jan-jaap]

I admit I intended to be a little provocative, but it was not my intention to offend. Maybe I should have added a  

These days everybody can be an armchair expert on any subject they choose, which also means that if you read things you need to question the credibility of the author and their agenda. I think we agree on that. That's why I didn't link to any particular article on climate change, I merely stated that the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence points towards human activity as the cause of the current rise in temperature. Individual pieces may be flawed, incomplete or whatever, but to discard all but a few percent of climate science as politically motivated is IMHO turning the world upside down.

You are very right that many things other than cars contribute to climate change, but (IMHO) the fact that we have "problem B" doesn't mean we can ignore "problem A". Stop pointing at the other guy. Be open minded and prepare so you're not taken by surprise by the time change is forced upon you. I'm not about to buy an EV anytime soon, but a "you can claw my V8 from my cold dead fingers" attitude would just harm me in the end.

An ever increasing population on a finite planet is of course not sustainable. I don't have the answer either. I mean, should we all give up meat so earth can sustain a couple more billion souls? The endgame of that would be 20 billion people with nothing but shit to eat. Not my cup of tea. I'm afraid the world is not yet ready for that discussion. You'd be labeled a Nazi.

[sgt_barnes]

Raion, I'm completely with you on the repairability of cars. There should be a "right to repair", or general availability of parts.

It's just the same with phones, nowadays. When I wrecked my good, old Samsung S3, I ordered a new display and transferred all the remaining parts over (main logic board, antenna, battery, ...), tunred it on and it was like it was before.

Good luck trying something like this with a new iPhone. Same for modern Samsungs.

But with the Bio-Diesel, that won't save you unless you get yourself one of those really old swirl chamber Diesels, preferably from Daimler. Anything more fun (aka with direct insertion and compressor), and it will have hickups once the sunflower oil share surpasses a certain threshhold. I even think that the old ones do not run very well on it when they are cold (the crap is too sticky, then IIRC).

But I wouldn't buy an electric car, either. At least not in the forseeable future. Since I ususally buy my cars used, there is no way I would get a decent battery with one. And I surely cannot afford a new Tesla. When my old Passat was sandwiched between a SUV from behind and an Audi in front, I settled for a newer model of the same car. My wife drives is with 4.7l / 100km (~50 Miles per Gallon) when going to her various job sites.

[theinonen]

...why does your government decide to buy from enemy countries? That's the question you should be asking.

I think one of the reasons people are fighting in Ukraine currently is because of thinking like this. When you demonize something and make it an enemy in your mind, then enemy is what you will get.

Nowdays only purpose of NATO is to sell weapons and current conflict in Ukraine is only good for that business. After all NATO compatible weaponry equals american made weapons and if you buy from someone else you get sanctions. Whole conflict could have been possible to avoid very easily just by backing off from Russian borders, but then again it would have been bad for the business. No one really wants military alliance at their borders that openly states that you are their enemy.


As for the Russian energy, Russia has actually been very reliable source of energy in Europe.

[Raion]

These days everybody can be an armchair expert on any subject they choose, which also means that if you read things you need to question the credibility of the author and their agenda. I think we agree on that. That's why I didn't link to any particular article on climate change, I merely stated that the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence points towards human activity as the cause of the current rise in temperature. Individual pieces may be flawed, incomplete or whatever, but to discard all but a few percent of climate science as politically motivated is IMHO turning the world upside down.

You'll notice that I wasn't particularly making this argument and it's for the exact reason that you've stated. I agree that there is political motivation and manipulation behind certain aspects of policy but it's not really productive to just sit there and discard it all as identity politics when there are legitimate concerns. The reason why I say that I don't fully trust the current models of climate change is because they are entirely based on alarmism with a better safe than sorry attitude that may or may not apply.

It's also my close pragmatism here that tends to shine through in that even if the United States in Europe were to stop emitting all carbon tomorrow it's not going to be enough and it's going to impact our economy and lifestyles and I'm sorry but I'm not moving to Washington DC or New York City or some other shithole metropolis that can support a no vehicle lifestyle. And I'm not calling them shit holes just because they don't agree with me politically I'm calling them shit holes because they are crime ridden and toxic places. I was pretty vocal about enjoying Northern Virginia when I lived there in 2014 and posted a couple threads about it but it ended up not being tenable for affordability and crime reasons.

You are very right that many things other than cars contribute to climate change, but (IMHO) the fact that we have "problem B" doesn't mean we can ignore "problem A". Stop pointing at the other guy. Be open minded and prepare so you're not taken by surprise by the time change is forced upon you. I'm not about to buy an EV anytime soon, but a "you can claw my V8 from my cold dead fingers" attitude would just harm me in the end.

Being born in the United States the cold dead fingers argument is a pretty common refrain among people here but I don't take it as far as most people do. I should also note that it's a little bit frustrating that people from other countries tend to make generalizations about us but I'm very thankful that you didn't direct those at me.

It's not a matter of finger pointing for me but pragmatism. We can stop most coal burning quite soon without much pain. I'm not buying an electric vehicle and I know for a fact that propane is not going anywhere because of restaurants and such that actually need that kind of fire producing gas so if petrol becomes untenable I will probably convert my vehicles to propane, legally or illegally.

One of the reasons why I said the last points is because if you don't give people a choice or offer them an alternative they're going to do something anyway. It's like when my best friend had to take away his grandfather's car. He ended up moving in with his grandfather and now acts as his personal transport most of the time to ensure that he can get around because otherwise his granddad literally told him that even if he had his license revoked he would just drive anyway. Give people detours not stop signs. That's always been a cornerstone of not only my politics but my attitude towards people.

An ever increasing population on a finite planet is of course not sustainable. I don't have the answer either. I mean, should we all give up meat so earth can sustain a couple more billion souls? The endgame of that would be 20 billion people with nothing but shit to eat. Not my cup of tea. I'm afraid the world is not yet ready for that discussion. You'd be labeled a Nazi.

Yeah I myself also tend to disagree with people who are talking about sacrificing billions or instituting Draconian population control as say China did for a significant portion of time. I think that realistically what's going to happen is the population is going to plateau unless a major catastrophe happens and we have a refugee crisis on our hands or something. I personally plan to have at least three or four kids when I get married and I don't feel like it's right for me to tell some poor uneducated woman in Africa that she can't have enough kids to support her subsistence farm. The Western world has always had this idea that it has to take on the burden of everyone else and that's not something that I'm in agreement with. Either we treat everyone the same in our moral standards or we don't and you would at least in the United States be called racist if you were to tell the Haitians to stop having so many kids or people in guinea-bissau to wear condoms so, here we are. I'm not going to tell those people what to do with their lives and I'm going to request that respectfully people stay out of my business about how many kids that I may or may not want to have.

Raion, I'm completely with you on the repairability of cars. There should be a "right to repair", or general availability of parts.

That's all swell but it's not going to work if we are required to be electrical engineers to say change out a battery pack safely unless you go the rich rebuilds route of just winging it and nearly getting yourself killed.

But with the Bio-Diesel, that won't save you unless you get yourself one of those really old swirl chamber Diesels, preferably from Daimler. Anything more fun (aka with direct insertion and compressor), and it will have hickups once the sunflower oil share surpasses a certain threshhold. I even think that the old ones do not run very well on it when they are cold (the crap is too sticky, then IIRC).

But I wouldn't buy an electric car, either. At least not in the forseeable future. Since I ususally buy my cars used, there is no way I would get a decent battery with one. And I surely cannot afford a new Tesla. When my old Passat was sandwiched between a SUV from behind and an Audi in front, I settled for a newer model of the same car. My wife drives is with 4.7l / 100km (~50 Miles per Gallon) when going to her various job sites.

Yeah when I was in college and we ran my friends car on that hodgepodge it was a 1978 Mercedes-Benz 300CD? Coupe diesel, he still has it and recently redid the vacuum system to get auxiliary water pump functioning.

Try that in a modern Volkswagen and it's not going to do too well. It's kind of funny because my ex-girlfriend from 2020 ended up buying an old golf TDI from the diesel gate era and I literally went to a junkyard and pulled the original diesel gate computer and put it back into the system and the car function just fine and got all of its mileage back LOL. Maybe not the most ethical thing in the world but I don't care. She still drives it.

I think one of the reasons people are fighting in Ukraine currently is because of thinking like this. When you demonize something and make it an enemy in your mind, then enemy is what you will get.

You'll notice that I haven't blocked or taken any particular action against Russian citizens because I don't honestly care about their personal disposition towards the war over there, I only have fault with their government and I only block the Chinese because of the massive amount of spam and useless traffic we get from them.

The Russians committed a genocide against the Ukraine in the 1930s and no amount of socialist arguments that's propaganda is going to change my mind there; and now they're trying to erase the Ukrainian identity even though Kyiv is older than Moskva or Petrograd by hundreds of years and the Ukrainian language is unique. I have a lot of frustration in that regards to how the Russians continue to be antagonistic against the West.

Nowdays only purpose of NATO is to sell weapons and current conflict in Ukraine is only good for that business. After all NATO compatible weaponry equals american made weapons and if you buy from someone else you get sanctions. Whole conflict could have been possible to avoid very easily just by backing off from Russian borders, but then again it would have been bad for the business. No one really wants military alliance at their borders that openly states that you are their enemy.

In some ways I can understand what you're saying here but I also would argue that the only reason Russia has this designation is due to state-sponsored terrorism. They literally have one of the most despotic leaders ruling Chechnya, someone who puts homosexuals and transgender people in camps and commits atrocities against his own people. The Russian government also uses the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church as it's mouthpiece of morality, there is no true separation of the two. What about all the people that they have killed both as the Soviet Union and now as modern Russia with poisons such as ricin and polonium? This is not the mark of a modern refined and civilized nation but of a power that is butthurt over losing half of its population headed up by a former KGB agent who openly allies himself with despotic rulers.

I have no investment in the United States other than being a current citizen which was by birth and not by choice. I haven't been a fan of our current politics in a very long time and I am cynical as to the future of the United States as well but I'm not going to discount the freedoms and things that I have here in the United States. I can own and shoot a machine gun in my backyard while in Russia alone I would be unable to secure anything but a shotgun for the first 10 years of ownership. Also my religion is illegal in Russia. And the PRC. And both Koreas, Indonesia, Brunei etc.

I occupy an interesting position thus and I only consider myself allied on politics with the US and Western Europe because I am very very skeptical of the Russian federation and it's alliances of crackpot Central Asian failed states.

As for the Russian energy, Russia has actually been very reliable source of energy in Europe.

Russia uses it's energy supply as a means of negotiation when it doesn't get its way. You know who else does that? Saudi Arabia primarily. The reason the United States has been sucking the KSA's tit is because one of our parties has an aversion to domestic oil production and has brainwashed 50% of the population or more into believing that oil through a pipeline is somehow more dangerous than having it pushed over in tankers that regularly spill oil. Short memory after all nobody seems to remember Exxon Valdez.

Also I don't know what country you're from but if you're one of border countries such as Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Czechia, Bulgaria etc. I'm surprised that you're taking this attitude considering how the Russians have historically not been very kind to these nations. If you're from Western Europe then all I would say is you're probably a little bit grateful that you have countries like Poland standing in the way allowing you to have the luxury of saying that.

[weblacky]

When it comes to electrics I think we all agree/know the battery tech is the #1 complaint. While it doesn't appear to be happening as fast as we've been told it should, Changes in battery chemistry/make-up and going from liquid to maybe solid electrolyte may provide us a view of batteries we've never seen before. Afterall, if we had batteries that last 1 million charges (with no more than 20% over cap loss) then you'd measure batteries in DECADES. If we had the tech were you could go to a junkyard, find an old "battery" and test it and it still have 15 years left on it, you'd still think that's great!

I mean we see batteries now as fruit, best when fresh, decays quickly, doesn't last very long in the fridge until it's spoiled. That's the central issue on electricity...I think everything else isn't totally relevant to the central argument of consumer cars/truck and the "engine", that turns the wheels.

While LEDs and Lithium batteries have given use the brightness pocket flashlight's man have ever know and the ability to last most of the day with your cell phone...it's still a perishable, friagle, pouch of goo...really hazardous waste.

It's better than alkaline..but it's not where it needs to be. And more to the higher point...energy storage as a whole is a HUGE problem. If we could "storage" the excess energy our grid products (to release when needed) with high efficiency...we'd be able to capture/recapture energy with minimal loss. That's really the big problem to solve...storing energy for a long time when we have surplus and not just letting it escape into the air...unused.

Right now fossil fuels act this way (in one direction only), a giant reservoir of storage, uncapped when we need it, stored (based on how refined it is) for various time/intervals ready to "uncap" when needed...instant liquid power. Even that's not very efficient for how much energy is really in fossil fuels either.

If we had a way to store and reconstitution energy very efficiently...I think most other problems would go away because so much is wasted in the first place.

[Raion]

I fundamentally think that batteries will never be efficient enough to do this. But even more so for me the problem is high AC current and other problems that make working on these vehicles in practical even if there is an interchangeability of parts and other things. I think that electric vehicles work in specific situations really well I wouldn't mind buying an electric four wheeler for example, I think it would be a lot of fun. But other things just preclude it. Even though I am preparing and eventually will get my own place with solar and generators I am fully intending that the possibility is that I may not have sufficient power or access to power to do all the things that I would like to do normally so any building that I build or modify will need to be easy to heat and cool as much as possible and probably have a larder among other things.

[Raion]

Learned today that Lotus parent Geely (a Chinese company where good brands go to die) it making the Emira the last ICE car Lotus does. Gods, I miss when Proton owned them.

[vishnu]

For lack of a better term, I'll call it the Green New Deal's plan; everyone gets a copy of Mau's Little Red Book, a red beret and a bicycle. No one who's not in the ruling elite gets to transport anywhere in a car, fossil fueled or otherwise. You ride your bike, take the bus, or the lite rail. Other than that you can walk. And loathe though I am to paraphrase one particularly genocidal regime from the last century, "anyone who makes a wry face gets a bullet."

[stormy]

I think in the next ten, twenty years we will see massive improvements in battery technology. Even in the last few years we've seen gigantic improvements. Last week I was reading about nuclear diamond battery tech. As battery technology improves, so will the availability and affordability of battery based energy things, like home energy, cars & other items. The ability to store energy efficiently and cheaply is going to be the most important thing for the future of humanity.

Yep, lots of stuff going on in the world, many good and many bad. But the crux is we're at a serious point in the future of our species right now. From what I can see we're heading in the right direction, and that is all we can hope for.