Quake3World

Tormentius wrote:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:
How about a bus, or a train, or even a fucking carpool.

Some of us need to transport extra people (like family), commute between cities (where a bus would take three or more times as long), travel between provinces (over a thousand kilometers), or just go out with some friends. Not everyone shares your lonely and pathetic existence so open your eyes and realize that what works for you doesn't work for the majority of us.

Mr.Magnetichead wrote: It works just aslong as you're willing to put some effort into learning to work it around your schedule.

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:There are plenty of alternatives to petrol that are available/have ben developed.

phoq wrote:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:There are plenty of alternatives to petrol that are available/have ben developed.

There are? Care to give a list of the ones that don't depend on oil?

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:

phoq wrote:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:There are plenty of alternatives to petrol that are available/have ben developed.

There are? Care to give a list of the ones that don't depend on oil?

Hydrogen powered cars for one which are avilable in Norway I believe as well as iceland.

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:

phoq wrote:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:There are plenty of alternatives to petrol that are available/have ben developed.

There are? Care to give a list of the ones that don't depend on oil?

Hydrogen powered cars for one which are avilable in Norway I believe as well as iceland.

"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"

Hydrogen isn't the answer either. As of 2003, the average hydrogen fuel cell costs close to $1,000,000. Unlike other alternatives, hydrogen fuel cells have shown little sign of coming down in price.

Even if the cost is lowered by 98%, placing the price at $20,000 per cell, hydrogen or hydrogen fuel cells will never power more than a handful of cars due to the following reasons:

I. Worldwide Shortage of Platinum

A single hydrogen fuel cell requires approximately 20-50 grams of platinum. If the cells are mass-produced, it may be possible to get the platinum requirement down to 10 grams per cell. The world has 7.7 billion grams of proven platinum reserves. There are approximately 700 million internal combustion engines on the road. Ten grams of platinum per fuel cell x 700 million fuel cells = 7 billion grams of platinum, or practically every gram of platinum in the earth.

Unfortunately, as a recent article in EV World points out, the average fuel cell lasts only 200 hours. Two hundred hours translates into just 12,000 miles, or about one year’s worth of driving at 60 miles per hour. This means all 700 million fuel cells (with 10 grams of platinum in each one) would have to be replaced every single year.

Thus replacing the 700 million oil-powered vehicles on the road with fuel cell-powered vehicles, for only 1 year, would require us to mine every single ounce of platinum currently in the earth and divert all of it for fuel cell construction only.

Doing so is absolutely impossible as platinum is astonishingly energy intensive (expensive) to mine, is already in short supply, and is indispensable to thousands of crucial industrial processes.

Even if this wasn't the case, the fuel cell solution would last less than one year. As with oil, platinum production would peak long before the supply is exhausted.

What will we do, when less than 6 months into the "Hydrogen Economy," we hit Peak Platinum? Perhaps Michael Moore will produce a movie documenting the connection between the President’s family and foreign platinum companies while following the plight of a mother whose son died in the latest platinum war?

If the hydrogen economy was anything other than a total red herring, such issues would eventually arise as 80 percent of the world’s proven platinum reserves are located in that bastion of geopolitical stability, South Africa.

Even if an economically affordable and scalable alternative to platinum is immediately located and mined in absolutely massive quantities, the ability of hydrogen to replace even a small portion of our oil consumption is still handicapped by several fundamental limitations. NASA, which fuels the space shuttle with hydrogen, may be able to afford to get around the following challenges, but there is a big difference between launching the space shuttle and running a global economy with a voracious and constantly growing apetite for energy:

II. Inability to Store Massive Qunatities at Low Cost:

Hydrogen is the smallest element known to man. This makes it virtually impossible to store in the massivequantities and to transport across the incredibly long distances at the low costs required by our vast globaltransportation networks. In her February 2005 article 1.entitled "Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Blackhole," Alice Friedemann writes:

Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve
gotten it into a container, it wants to get out, and since it’s
the lightest of all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it
from escaping. Storage devices need a complex set of seals,
gaskets, and valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil
off at 3-4% per day

III. Massive Cost of Hydrogen Infrastructure:

A hydrogen economy would require massive retrofitting of our entire global transportation and fuel distributionnetworks. At a million dollars per car, it would cost 350,000,000,000,000 to replace half of our current automotive fleet (700 million cars) with hydrogen fuel cell powered cars.

That doesn't even account for replacing a significant fraction of our oil-powered airplanes or boats with fuel cells.

The numbers don't get any prettier if we scrap the fuel cells and go with straight hydrogen. According to a recent article in Nature, entitled "Hydrogen Economy Looks Out of Reach:"

Converting every vehicle in the United States to hydrogen
power would demand so much electricity that the country
would need enough wind turbines to cover half of California
or 1,000 extra nuclea power stations.

Unfortunately, even if we managed to get this ridiculously high number of wind turbines or nuclear power plants built, we would still need to build the hydrogen powered cars, in addition to a hydrogen distribution network that would be mind-boggingly expensive. The construction of a hydrogen pipeline network comparable to our current natural gas pipeline network, for instance, would cost 200 trillion dollars. That's twenty times the size of the US GDP in the year 2002.

How such capital intensive endeavors will be completed in the midst of massive energy shortages is anybody's guess;

IV. Hydrogen's "Energy Sink" Factor:

As mentioned previously, solar, wind, or nuclear energy can be used to "crack" hydrogen from water via a process known as electrolysis. The electrolysis process is a simple one, but unfortunately it consumes more energy than it produces. This has nothing to do with the costs and everything to do with the immutable laws of thermodynamics. Again, Alice Friedemann weighs in:

The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always
be an energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to
spend more energy to do the following than you get out of it
later: overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move
heavy cars, to prevent leaks and brittle metals, to transport
hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of the
problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will
use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen
than you will ever get out of it.

Even if these problems are ignored or assumed away, you are still faced with jaw-dropping costs of a renewable derived hydrogen economy. In addition to the 200 trillion dollar pipeline network that would be necessary to move the hydrogen around, we would need to deploy about 40 trillion dollars of solar panels. If the hydrogen was derived from wind (which is usually more efficient than solar) the cost might be lowered considerably, but that's not saying much when you are dealing with numbers as large as $40 trillion.

Even if the costs of these projects are cut in half, that makes little difference over the course of a generation, as our economy doubles in size approximately every 25-30 years. In other words, by the time we will have made anyreal headway in constructing a "hydrogen economy", the problem will have already compounded itself.

If the "hydrogen economy" is such a hoax, why then do we hear so much about it? The answer is simple when you "follow the money" and ask "who benefits?" (Hint: GM, Shell, et al.)

Tormentius wrote:

seremtan wrote:it went down about 3p in the UK. but get used to high pump prices in the long term you planet-murdering cunts

Yeah, because everyone lives somewhere where walking or biking is an option :icon27:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:Ok seeing as I don;t live your fucking life how about YOU tell me where it's totally neccesary to drive yourself.

seremtan wrote:
yeah, because every car journey ever made by everyone in history is vital and utterly justified

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:

phoq wrote:

Mr.Magnetichead wrote:There are plenty of alternatives to petrol that are available/have ben developed.

There are? Care to give a list of the ones that don't depend on oil?

Hydrogen powered cars for one which are avilable in Norway I believe as well as iceland.

Tormentius wrote:

seremtan wrote:
yeah, because every car journey ever made by everyone in history is vital and utterly justified

Despite all of your sniveling people are still driving and when oil prices climb higher, people will simply invent new and more efficient methods of transport and will continue to drive. Personal transportation isn't going away so you can either go cry some more about it or learn to accept it as a fact of life.

Freakaloin wrote:did u hear? they found oil under isreal...more oil there then in saudi...