Should Humvees be illegal?
Offline So, I was watching a show about the car of the future and they were talking about all the different alternative-energy cars people are trying to develop such as hydrogen, ethanol, lithium battery, etc.
When I first started watching the show I was feeling hopeful. But after the show I was feeling somewhat depressed. it's looking pretty grim, frankly. Nothing's going to happen soon and, even when it does happen, it won't be enough.
They're saying by the year 2050 there will be 2.5 times as many cars on the road as there are now. And, while progress is being made towards finding alternative-energy cars, it's slow and none of the options so far is particulary ideal. Burning ethanol, for example, only reduces carbon emissions by 25%. And this doesn't even take into account all the energy required to preduce the corn needed for the ethanol. As it turns out it takes nearly as much fossil fuel to produce it as it replaces. Kind of pointless, isn't it?
While this is disturbing enough, there was something else that sort of pissed me off. Besides all the research being done towards alternative-energy cars, lots of research has been done to make current gasoline powered cars run more efficiently. They say that within the last 20 years engine efficiency has increased 30%. Yeah, that's good. That's not the part that pisses me off. What pisses me off is they also said that during this same time the average fuel economy rating has gone from 22mpg to 20mpg despite this increase in efficiency. Why? Because, rather than making cars more fuel efficient, car manufacturers have been using the technology to make "sexy" cars with more horsepower, or bigger vehicles. There are more SUVs on the road now than ever before.
So in this day and age of looming energy shortages and global warming, why do we even allow gas-guzzling vehicles? Why are Humvees, for example, even legal? Who the hell needs one of those? Considering the Earth's dire future with our current practices, would it be so aweful to make it illegal to own a huge vehicle without proving you have a need? No more Humvees, no more Ford Expeditions, unless you can prove you have a real need for one. For example, if you earn your living doing construction and you need a big-ass pickup truck to haul your tools and supplies then fine, you can own one. But if you're just some guy with money having a midlife crisis who gets a hard-on about the idea of driving a Humvee, no go for you, buddy.
Most of the time I've actually seen Humvees on the road they're being driven by middle-aged housewives buying groceries or taking the kids to Big 5 to buy new soccer balls. She's probably driving it because her dumb-ass husband had a mid-life crisis and thought he was going to reclaim his youth with it but soon realized he couldn't afford the gas to drive it to work everyday, so the wife's stuck using it to run errands. This is just selfish, wasteful, and stupid, IMO. Would it really be so bad to just outlaw this kind of crap?
"The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs" - Bill Maher
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Solar energy is our ticket out of the energy crisis (if we really want out. Some days I wonder...)
Essentially, I envision a large decentralization. DeludedGod already mentioned this - a network of linked-up, high-tech 'villages' of sorts, each with it's own personal solar power core. There's more than enough solar energy falling on the planet to cover even our current energy trends (the fgure is arbitrarily large - I don't recall it. So many hundreds (thousands?) of pentawatts per day); if you had a total sufrace area the equivalent of the state of california (not that unreasonable, given that they'd be spread-out) in solar collectors, you could use them to run a power surplus for the U.S. right now.
Hell, if we really took the initiative, we could just start paving the things on the rooftops of all our skyscrapers and turn whole cities into self-powering entities. Of course, when was the last time you saw anyone taking that kind of initiative?
Vehicles can simply be run via battery (even farming machinery), which we would (naturally) charge via solar energy. Well, in the land of ultra-optimistic speculation and theory, anyway.
You know what's funny regarding the price of food, though? I haven't noticed it going up at all. Fast food and pizza take-out remains cheap as ever ($20 for a hot meal delivered to my door that'll last two or so days if I'm lazy, just under 5$ a meal that does me for a whole day if I'm not).
A growing part of my wonders if this is a real issue behind the obesity problem we're experiencing (thank goodness for my logic-breaking metabolism, which seems to put zero fat on my bones regardless of what I consume).
EDIT: OMG I JUST HAD A GREAT IDEA! Don't have time to discuss, as I'm off to work, but I'll come back to it.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Living in the Pacific Northwest where it's cloudy 300 days a year I don' t have much hope for earth-based solar power generators. I'm hoping we'll go with the orbiting solar power generators. The only thing really standing in the way is money but, of course, that's what kills a lot of good ideas.
http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/August/20070820153255saikceinawz0.864773.html
"The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs" - Bill Maher
Here's an alternative fuel vehicle that I found on the internet which uses no fossil fuels and has zero emissions, plus it makes you look really cool to the other neighborhood kids
!
It's a really complicated system. For one thing, fast food joints are still able to get a lot of bulk. If you're getting hit with a $100 surcharge on a food delivery, but you're getting 300 bags of burgers, each with 100 burgers, your cost per burger remains essentially the same. For a place like mine where we order maybe 40 chickens at a time, a hundred bucks per delivery gets kind of tough.
Also, a lot of the costs are being absorbed internally. You can do a lot by changing the tip outs and wages for your non-waitstaff. The bottom line for most restaurants is that people are still coming out to eat, but they're tipping less, so wages are effectively going down.
There's going to be a delay, but I think you'll see all food prices take a jump within a year or two of gas hitting $5/gallon.
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Well, no doubt of that last point. Everything will jump once gas is at that (far more sustainable and reasonable) price. The fact that we currently spend more on a litre of bottled drinking water in North America than we do on gasoline makes one scratch their head little.
My idea, though!
I'm getting on a frickin' sail boat! No, I'm dead serious! when the shit hits the fan, I'm hitting the water. Create my own domesticated fish corral and live on sustainable fishing, solar/wind power adrift in a permanently mobilized home for the rest of my days. Fuck - it likely wouldn't be that hard to create floating sustainable communities (...until some assholes start drag-net fishing and kill the food supply, I guess).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Ultimately, the market will drive things.
Personally, I think it is as GOOD thing oil and gasoline are getting more expensive - that's the sort of thing that actually drives technology and forces breaking points between technolgies.
It's going to take $6/gal (or more) gas before hybrids become standard or fuel effieciecy rules the day. The Europeans already pay more than twice what we do for gasoline, and still hybrids are not especially prevalent there. There are many reasons for this, but the main reason is urban sprawl. The population in the EU is much more concentrated than in the US. You won't find many people who travel more than 10 miles to work by any means in the EU - in the US, the standard is probably at least 10 miles, with many doing five times that, in a car, by themselves, every day. Ultimately, peak oil is going to mean the end of the exurbs to a large degree - either meaning cities concentrate, or we telecommute more often.
Personally, I don't think it is necessary to make Hummers or any SUV or truck illeagle. The market is making such things completely impractical and social stigma is making them even more undesirable without the red tape. There will always be a fraction of people who NEED a big truck or SUV, but if prices and social stigma get to the point where soccer moms stop buying these things to haul groceries and their bastard kids to practice, things end up working themselves out.
I will say this though, pretty much no matter what you are driving, keep driving it. Ditching your three year old Hummer for a Prius actually does more harm in the long run. Sure, YOU save on gas, but what about the resources it took to make your new car, and who is going to buy your Hummer now? The most ecologically friendly thing you can do is driving whatever you own to extinction, then buying more responsibly. Trading up to a green vehicle when your car is less than 8 years old probably will harm the environment more than running what you have into the ground.
IOW, think about more than efficiency and the short term, as we are so apt to do.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. - Richard Dawkins
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The clerk at the store I often visit said something that I think rolls all of US suburbia into a nice neat package:
"2 blocks is an awful long way to walk for coffee creamer, isn't it?"
No, I don't suppose it is.
No need for a law. The number of Humvees in existence will be controlled by cost.
It might die a natural death, there will probably be a few car collectors around that will preserve some of them
People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.
Just for perspective:
The average price of petrol in the UK as of today, June 16, 2008: 118.4p per liter (source: http://www.petrolprices.com)
100 pence = 1 British Pound (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling)
1 British Pound = 1.9724 dollars (source: http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=GBP&to=USD&submit=Convert)
1 U.S. Gallon = 3.78541178 liters (source: http://www.google.com/search?q=us+gallons+in+liters)
Thus, as of today a gallon of gas in the UK is US$8.84 a gallon. Taxes amount to 63.7p per liter, or US$4.76 a gallon (source: http://www.petrolprices.com/fuel-tax.html)
[edit]At a gas station where I live in Pennsylvania, the price was US$4.049 a gallon. Thank Jake that we are not taxed like they are in the UK. It's a good thing their average commute is less than 5 miles!
Remember how you figured out there is no Santa? Well, their god is just like Santa. They just haven’t figured out he’s not real yet.