Emissions Problem

[AlanJ]

Hi All,
Reading the post covering the 2T and its problems with emissions in various countries it brought to mind seeing an article about general pollution from
various manufactured products, One of these is batteries for cars and bikes, and I am talking about all-electric which seems to be the way we are going, according to most governments Now, the article I read said that the pollution caused in the manufacture of the batteries for all-electric cars ( talking about one car) is greater than 8 years of pollution from that car if it was running on petrol. If there is truth in that article and maybe you might need two sets of batteries
say in ten years. Sadly, I can't remember where I saw that article, so I can't verify if that article is a fact, but to be honest, it does make you wonder doesn't it.
I have just remembered, the article was referencing Tesla cars. Stay safe Alan.

[JawasandMZs]

Apparently eco cars don't need daytime lights - they rely simply on the driver's unmissable glow of self-righteousness.

[Guesi]

And what environmental damage was caused by oil ? Amoco Cadiz, Brent spa, and all these things ?
And many countries were ruined by oil companies.

It must be clear that every kind of mobility pollutes the environment. So the best way to save the world is to reduce mobility.....

Who of us is ready to do that ?

[AlanJ]

Hi Guesi,
I do agree with you, but where I was coming from was not so much what happened in the past, but what is to happen in the future, and sadly the world is not doing very well at the moment with Covid 19 because that's one hell of a load of uncontrolled pollution, and loss of life.
Stay safe Alan.

[Puffs]

Tom: thank you for that one!

Alan, yes, electric driving is heralded as exceptionally clean, and I'm not sure this is really true. It is what people think, and car manufacturers follow (after all, they are commercial) and announce that from 20something onwards they will only produce electric vehicles.

It is true, if you ride 100km with an electric car, you do not emit much noxious gasses. You leave behind a bit of rubber and some other wear products (like from the brakes), but in all nothing too significant. So if you are a big city, with many people closely living together, that's what you want, and you say things like 'From January 20soon onwards you may only enter the city in an electric vehicle', and people like you for that, so they vote for you, and we all feel very happy and start to contently glow in the dark.

But is it true? Should you not consider all the pollution caused by the decision for that e-dream? So that would also include the pollution and energy use over the course of the production & delivery of the vehicle. And in the course of the entire life of the vehicle. And it includes the entire production cycle of those Lithium batteries, which gets little attention because it happens far away in China. And indeed: how long do those last? Is it 5 years? Or maybe 6, or 8? And then what happens with them afterwards? That should be included too, as well as all the energy consumption & pollution for all the processes in support of the lifecycle of this e-dream. And of course the bit on generating the energy to power the e-dream (which is a lot heavier due to those batteries). Yes, that also includes a fraction of the new means of power generation (atomic, wind, solar, hopefully fusion in the foreseeable future). If we include pollution from oil production, then also from the modern methods.

When I was slightly younger, the rule of thumb was that it cost as much energy to produce a car as the car would use for its entire life, in terms of fuel. Producing steel from the rust found in ore is an extremely energy-hungry process. I do not know exactly how those lithium batteries are produced, but I'm told that too is associated with undesirable side effects. And the batteries make up quite a significant fraction of the price of the car (ignoring electric motorcycles for now). Anyway, I'd like to see a truly honest comparison of all lifecycle costs, in terms of energy & pollution.

I'm guessing you mean the Brent Spar, which was a simple floating storage tank used as a buffer during the period of rapid development of UK North Sea oil production. After sufficient pipelines were laid, and production plateaued, it became superfluous, and the process of decommissioning it became a topic of lively public debate. In itself, the Spar never caused any pollution (other than during the production of the steel it was made of), but of course there were some sediments and leftover oil inside it. The owner proposed to sink it in the deep sea (which is a common fate of steel structures - they become reef-like), but due to the public discussion it was demolished onshore. Which was probably more polluting, and certainly more risky.

It is not only mobility that pollutes and drains our resources, it is all the things we want, at least many of them. It's 0°C outside, I want to sit in a comfy home --> fuel & isolation. I type this on a laptop --> energy to run, resources to make the thing (including the computer this website runs on). I sip some coffee --> how did that get here? Transport, production, packaging. And on it goes. We, mankind, as the dominating species on earth, have greatly influenced & modified our environment. This environmental impact is first & foremost proportional with how many we are. Yes, we can restrict the many, and the impact reduces, but what about the quality of life? Has there ever been any competition for resources? And if fusion succeeds, we just move on to the next bottleneck. Until we adapt as a species - or go the way of the Dodo.

[Guesi]

Hello

You are right about the fact that each living human produces pollution.

Brent spar was an example , but not the only one.
How many ships went down and pulluted the sea ?
How many governments were pushed away by oil companies ? Like Mossadegh in Iran in the 60s.

The thing is:
why do people talk about the negative things about electric mobility and go on driving their big SUVs ?
Isn´t this scizophrenic ?

As a matter of fact fossile fuel is limited, solar energy is not...

And how long did scientists researched on fuel cunsuming engines ?
And how long did they on elctric cars ?

So there still is a long road to go ...

about the batteries:

When the batteires are getting weak for powering a car, they are ready for a "second life" like power storage for solar cells.

That is why there is no recycling for these batteries. Because there are no batteries that need to be recycled.
In the futeure there will be the need for recycling, but this will be in 10 years or later...

After all everyone should be aware of the footprint he leaves and ask himself if it is really necessary to drive a car that weights 2 tons and has 200 hp just to drive to the next supermarket .

And if I every buy an electric car, it is not because I want to be green, but because I find this technique interesting.

Like this one:

https://sonomotors.com/

[AlanJ]

Hi, Puffs, Guesi,
So very well said, guys. Thanks for that
Alan.

[Puffs]

Hi Guesi, Alan, further on this:

Yes I understand the Spar was just an example. There are many examples of where mankind impacts its environment, pollution-wise the Spar was just a bad one. The Spar is an excellent example of where public opinion is happily formed without knowing all the facts, and still strongly points in one particular way. Public opinion is not always the best opinion, or correct: the earth has never been flat, even though for a long time the majority of people were strongly convinced it was. In a society where democracy rules, this is a problem.

Yes, I was wondering about the "many countries were ruined by oil companies" too, but let that pass. Thank you for giving an example. I did not know about Mohammad Mosaddegh, so I looked him up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh . Yes indeed, oil played a role, but it were the US & UK governments that actually did the deed. Of course oil played a role here, but oil = money = resources. In my previous I euphemistically asked "Has there ever been any competition for resources?" but obviously the answer is YES. Every war or conflict is either about religion or resources (or the combination thereof). Power.

We have a lilac tree in our garden, and in winter time my wife hangs some foodstuff in it, for the birds. That's a resource for them. Is there competition? Do they fight over it? Try it for yourself & see. Remember Darwin also only just looked and reported on what he saw (in his Beagle journey).

Over the course of evolution mankind has been in competition with the other species, and to some extent with the environment, but by now we have clearly won this competition, and we dominate our environment. It's time for us to come to grips with that, and realise that some of our characteristics that helped us get to where we are now (like the ability to procreate 6-vold each generation) has become a great burden and is now hurting us. Another characteristic is the psychological drive we have to always do better, bigger and greater (leading to your 2 tons/200 hp SUV for the supermarket & the school run). That psychological drive too might need modification. At some stage we have to learn that what we have is good enough.

There are a number of things in your post I don't fully understand, and one of them is how a battery which has proven to no longer effectively store & reproduce power can still be used well when attached to a solar cell. I'd say: if the thing no longer works well, it doesn't work well, right?

The other comment I have is this. The problem with batteries (even lithium) is that they are a very heavy medium to store energy in. And that weight you have to accelerate & decelerate almost continuously in a car (or a motorbike). With F = m*a weight always works against you. You want your medium to store your energy in as light as possible. True, the electro motor is normally lighter than an equivalent internal combustion engine, but still, in terms of weight the conventional internal combustion engine + fuel wins hands down. See in racing.
Now you are correct in saying that our fossil fuel reserves are limited and dwindling, but let us not forget that those too were made by solar energy, several millions/billions of years back. A main problem of course is that those reserves stem from a more carbon-rich environment, and if we now burn them we'll be putting that carbon, that was stored in the sub-surface, back into our environment. Not a good idea. We want central heating, not global heating.
But we shouldn't be relying on those fossil reserves for fuel. We can use the solar energy from the sun to capture carbon from our current environment and produce clean fuels. Like oils from rapeseed, or ethanol from sugar beets or cane. True, when you burn that (in an internal combustion engine), some carbon is produced, but on the whole the process is completely carbon neutral, as that same carbon was only a short while ago extracted from the environment. It's a cycle.

Slick idea, this solar integration. Yes, it may help, but probably not enough for normal use, in our area (haven't seen the sun for weeks). Unless we drive vehicles like they do in https://worldsolarchallenge.org/ .

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for good ideas, I don't drive a big SUV, and I actually think my ecological footprint is decently small.

[Guesi]

Hello

About mMossdadegh..... The main reason why he was overthrown was that he nationalized the oil industry of Iran.
So it is very sure that the oil industry (BP and Shell etc.) was not very pleased.
In the history books most people are sure that the secret services of UK and USA did the job and installed Shah Reza Pahlewi instead...

And about the batteries.....

The search for lighter and less poluting ways of storing electricity is just at the beginning.

Let´s compare it with the fuel cars.
Now we are in the 1920 of the last century (technically speaking).
There were billions of German marks, british pounds etc. spent to improve the fuel burning engines for more than 100 years. So in time we will see a progress in electric cars also...

And about the "second" life of batteries.

Supplying a car with electricity is far more stress for the battery than storing electricity from solar cells.
You can compare it to a ma´rathon runner in the age of 20.
This ist the new battery.

In the ago of 40 or 50 you still can run a marathon race, but not in the same time than you did with 20...

So the power of a battery in its second life is still enough, but not so "stressy" than powering a car.

[Puffs]

While sprint is more for the young ones & marathon for the mature, IMO the only way we can win this race (or at least postpone doom) is if power generation via fusion becomes effective.

[Guesi]

And what do we do meanwhile ?

Fusion will still take a while to come

[Puffs]

I do not have all the answers, but what we should not be doing is silly things, like polluting our environment with expensive batteries & obnoxious wind turbines everywhere. Whichever way we go, we will suffer from the errors made in the past, with too big a population to feed food & power. Pay we will, and not only in monetary terms, but we should stop making new mistakes.

And fusion may not take all that long: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12 ... er-station . In operation in 19 years would be astonishingly good news.

On the future of transport, I think the important question is: which technology is most most effective? And weight will be a very important factor therein, because in traffic it's the weight that needs to be accelerated & decelerated all the time. And range. I'd really like to see that honest & non-prejudiced comparison of the various options. And maybe a modern generation diesel on vegetable oil would do pretty good, as suggested by a test I saw. Or maybe a hydrogen cell powering electro motors. And yes, for short distance commuting, indeed maybe battery-powered electric. And maybe indeed we'll get paradigm-shifting developments in battery technology? But remember that batteries & electro motors are about equally mature as the internal combustion engine.

[AlanJ]

Hi Guys,
Everything you have mentioned as being a problem will sadly make a mess of this globe, to be honest, I thought that this horrible pandemic might give us all a nudge to pull together, and, to some extent that has happened, thank goodness, but, sadly again, countries like Russia and North Korea, China and others with government control just don't seem to understand what a good time is. Hang on a minute, the people in power know what a good time is because us plebs pay for it. There are also a lot of problems caused by clergy, but I had better not go down that alley. When you guys get to my age, and I hope you do, I also hope you can look back on your life and say, that was a good time, as I can.
Stay safe Alan

[Puffs]

Yes Alan, I said 'pay', but I really do mean that primarily in non monetary terms. As always, money is part of the equation (green technology will be more expensive), but the biggest cost will be in terms of quality of life. Things we have become used to will simply no longer be possible, or no longer socially acceptable, or simply no fun anymore because there are 70 thousand other people who want to do the exact same thing. Competition for resources; the Mad Max scenario. But it will take a few decades.

What is most worrying is that several 'people in power' find it necessary to completely disregard reality, and base their leadership on complete nonsense (possibly indeed to their own benefit). And no, that is not only in the countries you mention (I mean: the California forest fires due to unnoticed space lasers from wealthy Jewish bankers? Those school shootings were pre-staged?? 9/11 organised by the US government??? https://www.boston.com/news/politics/20 ... ene-quotes ). And this is no isolated example, and therein lies the real danger.

Not only do people have different objectives, also in their background and believe systems there is great diversity. In order to 'pull together' you have to first & foremost agree on things, and that will be difficult. But maybe in a few decades the incentive will increase.

Apologies for totally derailing your thread, all this goes beyond what should be discussed on a forum on MZ motorbikes. I'll shut up now.

[Guesi]

I don´t think that this is beyond this forum.
We are all MZ drivers, but we are all humans that are effected by all these things, so why not talk about it ?
As long as there is a civilized way of talking/writing and accepting other opinions (as far as possible) why not discussing other things than MZ problems ?

No matter if you are interested in politics or not, politics influence your life....