7 ms·

If we can't even use electric vehicles, what's left? Horses?

scarejunba 7y ago
Maybe we use electricity to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, create fossil fuels, and burn that again. Non-zero-emission and high energy cost but carbon neutral.
- kenneth 7y ago
  I've been thinking about this. Gasoline is a much better form of energy storage than lithium-ion. Perhaps if we mandated that gasoline (or a similar fuel) be synthesized from carbon extracted from the air instead of dug out of the ground, we'd be able to get, say, carbon-neutral flight with current technology.
  - kabouseng 7y ago
    You should read up on thermodynamic laws...
    - rcxdude 7y ago
      Thermodynamics is OK with this. It's not a way of producing the energy, just a means of storing transporting it which has some advantages over batteries (that said, energy in vs energy out efficiency is not one of them right now)
      - greatpatton 7y ago
        Which is really bad as ICE have a very poor yield... The efficiency of the global solution (transforming carbon to gas -> gas to mechanical energy) will be under 20%...
        jerf 7y ago
        On the other hand, you tend to get energy -> liquid carbon fuel -> consumer, where once the fuel is liquid it's cheap to move around without much further loss, whereas with electricity you tend to get generator -> AC to DC -> transmission -> AC to DC -> lithium ion battery. Each step is individually more efficient, but the whole is not necessarily obviously worse than liquid fuels. Electricity does have a lot more optimization opportunity, though, whereas those liquid fuel processes are pretty much at their optimum already. A local solar panel DC'ing straight into your car's batteries is going to be pretty good compared to the "generic" pipeline I gave you above. (On the other hand, it can go the other way, too; if your electricity notionally passed through something like a gravity storage step, you lost more there too.) Although from what I've gathered from looking at solar setups, most local solar setups won't actually do that, so it's an optimization yet to be done rather than something all roof-mounted solar panels already do.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    A YC company doing just this was the top story on HN just a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
  - notabee 7y ago
    Carbon neutral is not enough at this point to prevent a great deal of climate change. It just extends the timeline enough for us to figure out something better. Negative emissions technology is going to be necessary because the sheer quantity of excess carbon in the air is already far greater than what any of the natural sinks (which are also quite saturated already) will draw down in any reasonable timeframe. We also need at least a fighting chance if and when the natural feedbacks kick in. I encourage you to look up the number of metric tonnes of carbon debt we have above pre-industrial baseline and play around with the EPA equivalencies calculator. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
- chr1 7y ago
  Fossil fuel cars are bad in cities not because of CO2, but because of other harmful substances they produce. If there was a good fuel cell working with fossil fuels then your suggestion would work.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I guess we could all drive the Mirai.
    - chr1 7y ago
      That may work, in Europe Netherlands is planning to invest into updating natural gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen, as they have lots of wind, and possibility to store hydrogen in empty gas caverns in Groningen.
- ianai 7y ago
  This is an over simplification. Pulling carbon oh of the air will not refreeze the already melted glaciers. It will not sequester methane released from undersea sources, etc.
mrpopo 7y ago
1) Less electric vehicles. One per household at most. As lightweight as possible, also (that means less range, unfortunately). 2) Electric bicycles and scooters. These are lightweight by design. 3) Public transportation. We didn't go through the industrial revolution to go back to horses. All the solutions above are not available/appealing at the moment because of "bad" urban planning (cities and infrastructure built around cars). Things cannot change in a day, and the transition must start now, so electric vehicles cannot be avoided, but the urban transition must also happen quickly.
- adinobro 7y ago
  Electric bicycles and scooters are amazing. They are the most common form of transport in China as far as I can tell...
  - mcny 7y ago
    And increased spending in public transit including more automation while gutting pay to near minimum wage (which we should increase to a living wage ~$15) for public transit workers. Make public transit zero fare. We can pay for it with increased property taxes which should also help cool down speculative investment. The focus going forward should be on mass transit and not on cars.
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      Ezcept for non-profit universities buying up all the real estate and not paying taxes on the properties.
      - snovv_crash 7y ago
        Why should they get a break on property taxes? You don't get to mooch off of society's infrastructure just because you don't try to make money.
tzs 7y ago
The first result when I Googled "cost per year to keep a horse" [1] claims that the average monthly cost is from $200 to $325, and notes that is on par with a car payment. It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport. If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any that will be for sale within the next decade at least. They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7 km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that up for hours. They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can gallop a bit faster, but not for very long. [1] https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives-buying/ https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives...
- adrianN 7y ago
  When cars where introduced, a significant sales argument was that they don't shit on the streets. City streets used to covered in many inches of manure. It must have been quite the olfactory experience, especially after the rain.
- eesmith 7y ago
  $200 to $325/month if you maintain the horse yourself. If you let someone else board the horse it's another $260/month on average. Assuming $10/hour that's 26 hours, or about an hour a day to maintain your horse. How much time do you spend maintaining your car per day?
- fulafel 7y ago
  I wonder if it is possible to harness a stronger-than-human animal to power a wheeled vehicle. A couch potato human can bicycle faster than 13 km/h for hours after all. This could mean that a domesticated animal could get a big speed boost by using wheels instead of legs. The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big hand/leg strength imbalance...
bcraven 7y ago
In the early 1900s, people would shout "get a horse" at people in cars: Get a horse! According to Mr Norris M Davidson, a retired radio commentator on music including opera, and very widely read who was born c. 1908 this was a common American phrase in my childhood, when the motor car or automobile, as we called it, was a novelty. The roads not being paved were full of mud holes; tired were apt to burst, engines conked out and publication like Life, Puck and Judge were filled with illustrations about stranded motorists. Many showed the car being towed ignominiously by a horse. Urchins would shout 'Get a horse!' at every daring motorist. -Dictionary of Catch Phrases by Eric Partridge [0] [0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=%22get+a+horse%22+history+shouted+on+streets&source=bl&ots=zrlcp1aK6A&sig=ACfU3U36hdqvwPObI3DHdVfYXkr1DLlTjQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO3MrYx9ThAhX5RBUIHZuGDigQ6AEwDHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22get%20a%20horse%22%20history%20shouted%20on%20streets&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg...)
- ilovetux 7y ago
  My, how the stables have turned...

Maybe we use electricity to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, create fossil fuels, and burn that again. Non-zero-emission and high energy cost but carbon neutral.

kenneth 7y ago
I've been thinking about this. Gasoline is a much better form of energy storage than lithium-ion. Perhaps if we mandated that gasoline (or a similar fuel) be synthesized from carbon extracted from the air instead of dug out of the ground, we'd be able to get, say, carbon-neutral flight with current technology.
- kabouseng 7y ago
  You should read up on thermodynamic laws...
  - rcxdude 7y ago
    Thermodynamics is OK with this. It's not a way of producing the energy, just a means of storing transporting it which has some advantages over batteries (that said, energy in vs energy out efficiency is not one of them right now)
    - greatpatton 7y ago
      Which is really bad as ICE have a very poor yield... The efficiency of the global solution (transforming carbon to gas -> gas to mechanical energy) will be under 20%...
      - jerf 7y ago
        On the other hand, you tend to get energy -> liquid carbon fuel -> consumer, where once the fuel is liquid it's cheap to move around without much further loss, whereas with electricity you tend to get generator -> AC to DC -> transmission -> AC to DC -> lithium ion battery. Each step is individually more efficient, but the whole is not necessarily obviously worse than liquid fuels. Electricity does have a lot more optimization opportunity, though, whereas those liquid fuel processes are pretty much at their optimum already. A local solar panel DC'ing straight into your car's batteries is going to be pretty good compared to the "generic" pipeline I gave you above. (On the other hand, it can go the other way, too; if your electricity notionally passed through something like a gravity storage step, you lost more there too.) Although from what I've gathered from looking at solar setups, most local solar setups won't actually do that, so it's an optimization yet to be done rather than something all roof-mounted solar panels already do.
- dmurray 7y ago
  A YC company doing just this was the top story on HN just a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- notabee 7y ago
  Carbon neutral is not enough at this point to prevent a great deal of climate change. It just extends the timeline enough for us to figure out something better. Negative emissions technology is going to be necessary because the sheer quantity of excess carbon in the air is already far greater than what any of the natural sinks (which are also quite saturated already) will draw down in any reasonable timeframe. We also need at least a fighting chance if and when the natural feedbacks kick in. I encourage you to look up the number of metric tonnes of carbon debt we have above pre-industrial baseline and play around with the EPA equivalencies calculator. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
chr1 7y ago
Fossil fuel cars are bad in cities not because of CO2, but because of other harmful substances they produce. If there was a good fuel cell working with fossil fuels then your suggestion would work.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I guess we could all drive the Mirai.
  - chr1 7y ago
    That may work, in Europe Netherlands is planning to invest into updating natural gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen, as they have lots of wind, and possibility to store hydrogen in empty gas caverns in Groningen.
ianai 7y ago
This is an over simplification. Pulling carbon oh of the air will not refreeze the already melted glaciers. It will not sequester methane released from undersea sources, etc.

mrpopo 7y ago

1) Less electric vehicles. One per household at most. As lightweight as possible, also (that means less range, unfortunately). 2) Electric bicycles and scooters. These are lightweight by design. 3) Public transportation. We didn't go through the industrial revolution to go back to horses. All the solutions above are not available/appealing at the moment because of "bad" urban planning (cities and infrastructure built around cars). Things cannot change in a day, and the transition must start now, so electric vehicles cannot be avoided, but the urban transition must also happen quickly.

adinobro 7y ago
Electric bicycles and scooters are amazing. They are the most common form of transport in China as far as I can tell...
- mcny 7y ago
  And increased spending in public transit including more automation while gutting pay to near minimum wage (which we should increase to a living wage ~$15) for public transit workers. Make public transit zero fare. We can pay for it with increased property taxes which should also help cool down speculative investment. The focus going forward should be on mass transit and not on cars.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    Ezcept for non-profit universities buying up all the real estate and not paying taxes on the properties.
    - snovv_crash 7y ago
      Why should they get a break on property taxes? You don't get to mooch off of society's infrastructure just because you don't try to make money.

tzs 7y ago

The first result when I Googled "cost per year to keep a horse" [1] claims that the average monthly cost is from $200 to $325, and notes that is on par with a car payment. It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport. If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any that will be for sale within the next decade at least. They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7 km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that up for hours. They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can gallop a bit faster, but not for very long. [1] https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives-buying/ https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives...

adrianN 7y ago
When cars where introduced, a significant sales argument was that they don't shit on the streets. City streets used to covered in many inches of manure. It must have been quite the olfactory experience, especially after the rain.
eesmith 7y ago
$200 to $325/month if you maintain the horse yourself. If you let someone else board the horse it's another $260/month on average. Assuming $10/hour that's 26 hours, or about an hour a day to maintain your horse. How much time do you spend maintaining your car per day?
fulafel 7y ago
I wonder if it is possible to harness a stronger-than-human animal to power a wheeled vehicle. A couch potato human can bicycle faster than 13 km/h for hours after all. This could mean that a domesticated animal could get a big speed boost by using wheels instead of legs. The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big hand/leg strength imbalance...

bcraven 7y ago

In the early 1900s, people would shout "get a horse" at people in cars: Get a horse! According to Mr Norris M Davidson, a retired radio commentator on music including opera, and very widely read who was born c. 1908 this was a common American phrase in my childhood, when the motor car or automobile, as we called it, was a novelty. The roads not being paved were full of mud holes; tired were apt to burst, engines conked out and publication like Life, Puck and Judge were filled with illustrations about stranded motorists. Many showed the car being towed ignominiously by a horse. Urchins would shout 'Get a horse!' at every daring motorist. -Dictionary of Catch Phrases by Eric Partridge [0] [0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=%22get+a+horse%22+history+shouted+on+streets&source=bl&ots=zrlcp1aK6A&sig=ACfU3U36hdqvwPObI3DHdVfYXkr1DLlTjQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjO3MrYx9ThAhX5RBUIHZuGDigQ6AEwDHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22get%20a%20horse%22%20history%20shouted%20on%20streets&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg...)

ilovetux 7y ago
My, how the stables have turned...