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It’s pretty clear that battery technology and cost efficiency is going to have to advance substantially before it can have a meaningful impact on air transport.
by mogadsheu 7y ago
It’s pretty clear that battery technology and cost efficiency is going to have to advance substantially before it can have a meaningful impact on air transport.
Blimps might be a slight exception.
- sliken 7y agoOr just use hydrogen, it's a much denser energy storage medium, and airflight is less cost sensitive than ground transportation.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoOr not bother with air taxis, civilisation won't collapse because some rich arsehole can't get across New York in five minutes.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoSure, but on another hand we should encourage the rich asshole to spend his money so it could be useful to the rest of the economy.
- hasfhashdahsd 7y agoBut does it? Just because it got a battery, it doesn't mean it actually solves the issue "getting around without taking forever and wasting resources" well. In the long run, it would be better to reduce commutes. And that's something we can do with some policies, on paper. No need to invent human slingshots or anything.
- Scoundreller 7y agoUniversal basic income and massive carbon taxes to pay for it! It’s about time we tax actual destruction, not a minimum wage earner’s Netflix subscription.
- himinlomax 7y agoBest way to do it I've ever seen is the automated transactions tax, whereby you replace most taxes with a small percentage taken on every financial transaction (plus a larger one when converting to/from cash to account for the black economy). It's progressive because poor people will only pay twice (once on their salary/benefits, once when buying stuff), whereas rich people will pay several times when moving money around.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWhy tax the income side when you could just tax the consumption side?
- pjmorris 7y agoTaxing consumption is regressive; Bill Gates can't eat that many more hamburgers than the average person.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWrite everyone a cheque. Taxing income is quite regressive too: it’s how people with nothing can survive.
- himinlomax 7y agoTaxing income at a few % as this scheme intends is not regressive.
- himinlomax 7y agoFor simplicity's sake. All transactions are taxed equally, no way to evade it by making false or borderline claims about the nature of exchange, and no resource have to be wasted on optimizing or litigating them.
- organsnyder 7y agoExpect a new class of companies to spring up overnight that are dedicated to bundling transactions to avoid this new tax. For instance, I could make a single transaction to my broker that covered all of my expected expenditures for the month, and that broker would then disburse it to my payees, bundling it with funds from other payers to avoid the tax on the other end. I am strongly in favor of a tax on all stock market transactions, though—anything to deter HFT, which IMHO has little societal benefit while externalizing a ton of risk.
- pjc50 7y agoIf climate casualties become serious, people might start questioning whether allowing people to be rich and be assholes and not contribute to solving the problem is sustainable...
- choeger 7y agoIt also won't collapse because some rich arsehole won't be able to post comments on Hackernews from their smartphone.
- jnsaff2 7y agoHydrogen is denser by weight, but by volume the story is completely different. The tanks need to be large.
- wffurr 7y agoWhat if most of the aircraft was hydrogen tank or bag? Then it could use the hydrogen for some of its lift! We can call it an "airship". Or compress the hydrogen, but then you have 700 PSI handling issues and the tanks have to be very strong.
- AllegedAlec 7y ago> We can call it an "airship". Yeah, let's make a huge one and call it the Hindenburg! That sounds like a foolproof plan.
- WorldMaker 7y agoToo bad that there hasn't been decades of materials science improvements, including and in particular to handling flammable materials, between some highly propagandized disaster and today.~ (Almost every modern cruise ship is bigger than the Titanic, imagine if people acted like the Titanic was the last word on how big a cruise ship could get.)
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> just use hydrogen At that point, why not package the hydrogen on a carbon chain...oh wait. A lot of these schemes compare poorly against synthetic jet fuel manufactured from atmospheric carbon.
- Hypx 7y agoLikely the issue is cost. We can make liquid H2 pretty cheaply these days. We don't know if synfuel can get close to that price.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoI remember Sid Smith saying that we have enough lithium in known reserves to replace every car on earth one time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&t=35m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&t=35m29s
- jacobush 7y agoYesterday I learned that Sodium batteries might become a contender to Lithium batteries. And they are safer.
- marcosdumay 7y agoSodium is very clearly a contender for stationary batteries. It may even be competitive for surface mobile applications like cars... But there is just no way it can compete on air transport.
- myself248 7y agoI keep being intrigued by vanadium redox flow batteries, and I've seen some in the real world in stationary applications. And the prospect of instant charging by spit-swapping in a mobile application is pretty wild. How scarce is vanadium, though?
- selectodude 7y agoIt’s like 2 percent by mass of spent iron slag.
- detritus 7y agoNow now, no need to be rude. /
- marcosdumay 7y agoVanadium has an horrible weigh/charge ratio. That's why it's used in stationary applications. Sodium redox flow batteries are all the hype nowadays, because sodium is much cheaper, sulfur for the oxydizer is also very cheap, weight/charge is very high, and volume/charge (important for stationary applications) is also much higher. But I think it's stuck in a patent minefield.