We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio. VW's US boss has testified to Congress, blaming a few rogue software engineers. All the while, questions have raged about VW Group's future: which projects are safe, which ones are on the chopping block, and how exactly will the company recover from this?
...
VW's board has finally started to answer some of those swirling questions. For starters, there's going to be much more emphasis on electrification. Electric vehicles and hybrids have played more of a bit part at VW, compared to Toyota, GM, and domestic rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz. That's going to change with a standard electric architecture that can be used across multiple vehicles and brands.VW Group isn't devoid of hybrid and EV know-how. Audi's Le Mans program has taught it a lot about high voltage automotive systems, and Porsche has a wealth of experience from the 918 Spyder, Panamera Hybrid, and even the 919 Hybrid racer. VW would be smart to leverage all these programs.
VW is the largest car company in Europe. This is what sudden, disruptive technological change looks like.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday October 16 2015, @02:03AM
And what does it look like exactly?
Because to me, it looks like a buzzword-laden vision statement without a strong plan to back it up, being offered solely to distract from their criminal lying about their failure to actually achieve the last "sudden, disruptive change" they wanted to sell us (clean diesel).
Snake oil didn't work out for ya, eh? Well, I've got some eel oil here in the cupboard!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Friday October 16 2015, @02:07AM
This is what PR looks like. I guess a switch to electric in Europe is imminent now that diesel has been shown to be crap.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Friday October 16 2015, @05:11PM
Should be much easier to optimize the diesel engines for efficiency and environmental friendliness if you're just using them at a narrow operating band for charging the battery/capacitors. Or at most two bands- "normal charging" and "extra power".
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @02:07AM
Massssster, the villagers have caught us sacrificing young virgin girls to the gods of evil!
No problem, Eegor, just distract them with some new shiny baubles. Try this new EV. Now, do you have a supply of young virgins lined up for All Hallowed Night, or must we import some from Boko Haram?
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday October 16 2015, @02:18AM
That was my reaction as well. Funny thing, I was sure that "sudden, disruptive technological change" involves somebody unveiling a new (or dramatically improved) product that's so amazing that it becomes the standard in a relatively short period of time.
Though I guess that in the increasingly dystopian world we're living in, it'd have to involve some company lying its head off in order to make a few extra bucks at the expense of people's health/safety, then pushing blame onto a handful of individuals while pushing their new, more expensive products that weren't selling as well as they'd hoped. :-/
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Friday October 16 2015, @03:41AM
It looks like a sea change to me.
Look, Europe was committed to diesel. Not just Volkswagen. Diesel was was something akin to an official EU policy.
Now VW admits that they can not meet EU pollution requirements with their best technology, to say nothing about the tougher US standards. The tiny engine with blowers and direct injection still can't be made to meet the restrictions.
The towel has been thrown in.
VW is going to get out of Diesel as fast as they can, and go Electric. And that is probably the right decision.
The shorter distances in the EU are probably better suited to battery cars than is the US.
The EU has very little in the way of petroleum reserves. Diesel was always just a stop gap solution for the EU.
Nobody will trust VW diesels going forward anyway.
Much as you want to sling hatred for past sins, you should be willing to see this as a viable plan going forward.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday October 16 2015, @07:36AM
Driving an EV in Europe is a bit of a mixed bag some times, but is generally pretty good. What we need is more infrastructure (chargers), but even that will become less of an issue as new models with longer ranges come out. Nissan should have a 250km range Leaf out next year, for example.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 1) by xorsyst on Friday October 16 2015, @10:20AM
There are 2 problems I can see with EVs in Europe compared to US:
1. Fewer families have 2 cars. If you only have 1 car, having an EV means hiring a car for longer trips or missing out on making those trips. The current range of the Leaf, for example, won't even manage a decent family day out without charging infrastructure at the location you're going to.
2. Much housing stock without private drives for charging infrastructure at home. In England, for example, many older towns are full of victorian streets with on-road parking only.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 16 2015, @05:40PM
1) The Leaf is a joke wherever it is sold.
2) News Flash: Man Complains about Free Taxpayer subsidized parking!
These problems exist everywhere, in every big city. Battery Electric vehicles won't fit every situation. Maybe Fuel Cell electric [reuters.com] will work better. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are all coming out with fuel cell vehicles.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:20PM
Wonderful, we need a new source of Eurotard snobbery. Much like the crowing of how higher percentages of multi-lingual populations clearly show some innate moral and cultural superiority over the US and rest of the world, about ten years out we will hear how their higher proportions of EV vehicles on the road will obviously signify some innate moral and cultural superiority over the US and the rest of the world. Both cases largely ignoring the fact that those situations were unwillingly thrust upon them, the first necessitated by the fact that you have two or more populations speaking different languages confined to relatively small spaces, and the latter for the reasons you state.
There's a reason there are no European Googles and such, it is because to be in the best constitution for innovative and entrepreneurial thinking, one needs to look up from looking down one's nose and one needs the stick extracted from up inside their backside.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @02:19AM
First, I'm as skeptical as anybody that this will play out as a shift from diesel to electric...but, damn, am I hoping it does!
If Europe makes a rapid transition to electric vehicles...well, that would be an essential ingredient in us avoiding economic collapse in a timely manner as petroleum reserves begin to run dry. First, it frees up petroleum that would have just been burned to make plastics and fertilizer and the like that we've no economical alternatives for today. Second, it drives battery technology development like there's no tomorrow...and those batteries don't have to go in cars. A big battery in a closet paired with enough solar panels on your roof and suddenly you don't need any coal or natural gas to keep the lights going (and the car rolling). At that point, we get lots of luxury to wean ourselves off the remaining fossil fuels, plus we open the potential for insane amounts of energy at our disposal. Just the residential rooftops in America receive enough sunlight for all the entire planet's energy needs -- and that's at today's off-the-shelf-of-your-home-improvement-store's efficiency levels.
I'm actually going to sleep a very little bit better tonight having read this article....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @02:33AM
A balanced back of the envelope [instituteforenergyresearch.org] look at the potential for solar power in America:
Though solar technologies are improving, meeting current US electricity needs with today’s photovoltaic technology would require about 10,000 square miles of solar panels—an area the size of New Hampshire and Rhode Island combined. Moreover, if photovoltaic power is established in those areas of the country like the desert southwest where sunshine is abundant, consideration must be made for transmission lines as well as the “line loss” that accompanies electrical transmission over great distances.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @02:53AM
The IER is not a balanced anything, they are yet another oil industry shill. Just reading the front page of their website ought to have been a clue, googling the name would have confirmed it for you.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday October 16 2015, @03:12AM
OK, mister Balanced, let's assume that your 10,000 square mile figure is correct; the lower 48 states have an area of about 3,000,000 square miles, so we're talking about a third of one percent of the total land area.
Your estimate also ignores all the other non-fossil energy sources, like wind, hydro and nuclear, even those that are already operational. And you assume that solar panel efficiency, which has been steadily improving, is already as high as it'll ever get. And you assume that we can't improve the efficiency of any of our power-using devices.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 16 2015, @03:32AM
Moreover, the efficiency of deployed panels lags behind the efficiency of panels in the lab or in space. Although $/W is probably the more useful metric. We need cheap, wallpaper-like solar panels that can be placed everywhere.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @03:47AM
Don't be a PV efficiency snob. [ucsd.edu]
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:52PM
Despite all that, since that article was written, efficiency of commercially available panels has gone from 16% to 22%. [solarcity.com] That's about a 38% increase over 4 years.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday October 18 2015, @12:47PM
That entire argument is attacking a straw man. The problem is not that 15% is too low, it's that it's changing too fast. That article was written in 2011. I considered PV a couple of years before that and the panels were 8%-12% (with a fairly similar cost per Watt over that range). Now, panels are closer to 20-22%. The theoretical maximum is something around 38% (sort of. There are a few tricks that can boost it a bit higher). The gains between 10% and 30% are likely to be made fairly quickly, though I wouldn't be surprised if it slowed down after 30%.
If you're looking at a PV installation as a 20-year investment (most now come with at least a 20 year warranty), then waiting 3-4 years to get a 30% higher annual return seems like a good idea. If you're looking at it for immediate payback at commercial scales, then you probably don't care about efficiency at all, and dirt-cheap 8% panels that you can blanket a large area with would be a better bet than expensive 22% ones.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Friday October 16 2015, @03:38AM
I live in the Netherlands, so I don't know the average roof area on american homes, but I get about 2/3 of my electricity consumption from about half of my south facing roof area.
If I used all of it and maybe a little bit of non-optimal placed roof I can easily produce more electricity than I'll need by quite a margin.
If everybody did this it would still be a huge area, but we probably already own most of it and are not doing anything usefull with it anyway.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @03:45AM
I'm in Arizona, granted, but I live in a very modest suburban home with between a third and half of the total rooftop surface area covered in panels. And I generate half again as much electricity as I use -- enough that I'll be able to power an electric vehicle when I finally get one.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @03:39AM
Let's do the math, shall we?
Insolation is roughly a kilowatt per square meter. If we assume an average of the equivalent of 5 hours per day of direct overhead sunlight, that's 5 kWh / day / m^2. With 15% efficient panels, that's about 3/4 kWh / m^2 / day.
There're about 300,000,000 Americans. Pulling a conservative guesstimate out of my nether-bits, let's assume each American gets 1000 square feet of rooftop; round that to 100 square meters to keep the math easy. That's 30 billion square meters of residential rooftops, or a bit over 10,000 square miles -- exactly the figure you provide as somehow being outrageous. That times 3/4 kWh / m^2 is a bit over 20 billion kWh / day, which is about a terawatt.
Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] that world energy consumption is about 18 terawatts.
So, my off-the-cuff suggestion that American residential rooftops are enough for the entire civilization was a bit off...but not significantly for this discussion. Even without considering anything past American residential rooftops -- none of the commercial rooftops, no parking lots, let alone all the non-American rooftops -- we're already at a significant fraction of the entire global demand.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 16 2015, @08:21AM
There are some generosity in your estimates. Quite a bit actually.
There is roughly half the houses that have their roofs facing east west rather than north south. Now you might think this is an advantage, because you could harvest early morning and late evening sun. But invariably one side is shaded, and evening.morning sun is still no match for half the area of daytime sun. So you lose half the roof tops before you even get started.
Then subtract at least the winter months of all those houses north of some arbitrary latitude where it just wouldn't pay to put in panels at risk of winter snow and ice.
Then you have to subtract the number of families that life in apartment buildings. You could turn around and add all the commercial buildings with big roofs, but those are a small fraction of any metropolitan area.
Still it would probably generate all the power we would need (In the US). Even with those limitations.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @01:49PM
The photovoltaic panels need not conform to the shape of the roof. No matter whether your roof faces N/S, E/W, or some angle in between, you can use the entire surface area of your roof to get sunlight. Putting struts under your panels may be less eye appealing than screwing them down on the roof directly, but you can angle those panels whichever way you need them to face. In fact, you might even put up more square feet of solar panel, than you have roof, if you allow them to overhang the roof some. Not to mention, any east, south, or west facing wall can support yet more panels. And, if that isn't enough, you can always put some free-standing panels over your driveway, part of your yard, or whatever. Erecting the struts and beams to support all of this may make the panels less economically attractive, but I'm pretty sure that they'll still pay off in the long run.
Why restrict yourself to the roof dimensions and contours?
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 16 2015, @05:42PM
Why restrict yourself to the roof dimensions and contours?
Because: WIND.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @05:55PM
That reason is inadequate. Especially since I mentioned walls that face other directions than north. Wind isn't even a factor with those.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 16 2015, @06:22PM
Wind is a factor any time you start mounting panels on struts.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @02:40PM
All of your objections are why the envelope only assumes five hours per day of noon-equivalent insolation. With perfectly-aligned panels on a tracking mount and in a climate with no clouds, you'd get almost twelve hours per day; my assumption is that you'd only get 40% of that with fixed panels in typical US climactic conditions.
And, yes. There're places that won't even do that well. But there're just as many places that'll do better. The worst places in the Lower 48, in the Pacific Northwest, are still no worse than half as good as it is in the best -- and, to boot, better than the average in Germany. As I noted in another post, I've got somewhere between a third and an half of my own modest home covered in panels and it's enough not only for all my current electricity needs but for an EV as well. If I teleported the house to Seattle and covered the entire roof with panels, I'd still meet all my needs, plus those of an EV, plus a surplus. Indeed, I'd have a generous surplus...far and away my biggest usage is in cooling from May through October, including at least a few months where the overnight low hovers around 90°F and the daytime high rounds to 110°F. Seattle isn't going to need anywhere near as much energy to maintain a livable indoors temperature.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday October 16 2015, @09:41PM
Snow is a problem, but it's not a show-stopper. I live in central NY state, and we get plenty of snow, but I still see solar panels all over the place. The panels are tilted, and they're mounted where the sun shines - so the snow melts, sublimates and/or slides off pretty quickly. Also, the snow season doesn't last that long - 4 months at most, usually 2 or 3. And those are the months with the shortest days, so you're not losing that much sun, anyway.
Which brings me to the real problem. On the winter solstice, we only get 9 hours of daylight, so we can't rely too heavily on solar. We'll always need something to supplement it. Unless we store the excess power during the summer, and use it in the winter, but that's not feasible at the moment.
(Score: 5, Informative) by gnuman on Friday October 16 2015, @03:44AM
Though solar technologies are improving, meeting current US electricity needs with today’s photovoltaic technology would require about 10,000 square miles of solar panels
And what is the area of roofs in America? Let's do a back of the envelope calculation
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/units.html [census.gov]
So, about 80 million regular houses, conservatively taking that number. Let's say that conservatively, average roof size is about 250 sq. meters (about 2700 sq. ft., or about 1500 sq. ft. house). That gets us an area of 20 billion square meters. And since this is metric, I can just chop of 6 zeros to get to square kilometers. 20,000 sq. km. And that is apparently 7700 square miles.
So, I don't know, but just putting some solar panels on roofs instead of regular asphalt shingles seems to be somewhere in the ballpark, even when using some outlandish numbers. And this doesn't include commercial roof installations, like ginormous box stores and their infinite parking lots (eg. putting PV on "roofs" of parking lots). Furthermore, this reduces heat island effects.
In reality, we "all" know that there is more to power than PV solar. Wind is kind of advanced along with hydroelectric. Then there is nuclear - another no-CO2 emitting option. Rooftop PV, as used during peak hours, should be sufficient to charge significant portion of electric cars and run air conditioning and other things. And as illustrated above, there is no need to coat Nevada with solar panels - just coating rooftops is a major step in the right direction.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @03:50AM
I'm glad we independently took two different approaches to the estimation and came up with figures that round to the same significant digit....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday October 16 2015, @05:59AM
Not to diminish your point, but it seems to me that the elephant in the room with regard to "green" energy sources is the task of heating buildings during the winter. Here we are talking about energy consumed in the form of metered electricity and fuel for vehicles. In my case, both of these things combined are less than the energy used to heat my house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @07:36AM
Natural gas is renewable: caused by anaerobic decomposition of plant matter.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @11:19AM
Good insulation and a ground source heat pump will get you there. Radiant floor panels instead of forced air or radiators make it even better, and when you first experience them on a winter day you'll think you've died and gone to heaven. People who use GSHP's regularly report trading heating bills of thousands of dollars for an electricity bill of $100 for the entire winter. If you have solar panels, then you wouldn't even have that. Unless your house sits directly on a rock slab, you can use either the column- or trench method to sink your heating loop, depending on how much subsoil you have.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @01:56PM
Insulation, and new windows. Almost any home can be bricked. Any home with an attic can probably take some additional insulation, unless you've already filled it to the rafters.
We really need now construction methods that are inherently more energy efficient. Typical walls in the US are about 6 inches thick. Thicker walls, with more dead air space goes a long way toward insulation. There's little reason that your exterior walls can't be a foot or more thick. Concrete slabs are usually poured on the ground. Digging down a couple feet, then putting styrofoam on the ground, and finally using concrete with air mixed in will reduce energy consumption even more. Concrete roofs capable of supporting sod, and possibly some shrubs and bushes, really reduces your energy needs.
All we need do is thing outside the box, and we can cut energy consumption far more significantly than most people think.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @03:10PM
Exactly. The biggest bang for the buck with energy savings is insulation. Now with blown-in or spray-in insulation it's dead easy. They show up in the afternoon and a couple hours later you are good to go. Then you win in the summer and the winter. I threw in GSHP (ground source heat pump) up-thread because it's such an excellent off-grid replacement for natural gas, oil, or wood. But even if you don't do that you save tons because you simply don't have to burn as much of the stuff to get the temperature you want.
If you're building something new then a Passiv house design will save hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of the structure ($5K * 30 years). Consider what that money would turn into if you put it into an index fund instead of handing it to Big Fossil Fuel/Big Power and you've suddenly paid for some kid's college or built a nice retirement nest egg for yourself. It would be a massive shot in the arm for the economy, too. The US spends $365 billion on oil alone every year. If we didn't do that it would be like giving the economy an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ($800 billion)-size stimulus every other year.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:09AM
A lying prick outfit says "our future is electric" and you'll sleep better? Ok, whatever.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday October 16 2015, @03:42AM
A shift from diesel and gas to electric is pretty much inevitable. At least for the bulk of the vehicles out there. I'm sure it's going to be a while before electrics are capable of handling the extremely low temperatures of the arctic. It's tough enough on gas or diesel cars, but electrics are still quite sensitive to temperature fluctuations.
The timing of the announcement is a bit fishy though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @11:25AM
Of course the timing is fishy. Of course the President of VW is saying it for PR value. But they had to have been talking about EVs internally at VW already for years--my brother's an engineer at Ford and they are. But when the largest car company in Europe signals they're going all in on EVs, it sends shockwaves throughout the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) world. It means that every other car maker will have to accelerate their transition to EV models. It means that research budgets begin to shift away from the ICE to better batteries and composite materials (for weight savings). It means it starts to rapidly become less of a good idea to invest in oil stocks and to own gas stations. And given how tied huge chunks of the manufacturing economy are to the ICE, its parts suppliers, transportation, etc, that means a massive shift; none of those suppliers and regions are going to want to go slow to adapt lest they be left holding the bag.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday October 16 2015, @03:48AM
Do the math:
Energy Density sorted by Wh/l
Ethanol LiFePO4 (best large scale battery tech at the moment, no a fantasy, you can buy it)
6,100 Wh/l 970 Wh/l
7,850 Wh/kg 439 Wh/kg
Batteries are high tech in every aspect: production, use, (little, if any) recycling.
They use rare earth or other non regenerative materials that only last a couple of decades on a global scale.
Forget it.
What's also not working is the way ethanol get produced today. Monoculture maize to ethanol ? No way.
What's needed is a cheap (in terms of money an embedded energy) and distributed way of ethanol production.
Ferment the shit (sugar) out of EVERY organic mater.
The key technology is (cold) molecular filtering of ethanol molecules, not high energy distilling from max. 18vol.% (fermenting) to 99vol.% (fuel)
Affordable Graphene or Graphene analogs filter is the thing we need badly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @04:03AM
Energy density matters not one whit. So long as the miles per overnight charge is comfortably greater than the miles driven during a day...that's all that matters.
For most people, the Nissan Leaf and its competitors with a mere 80 miles per charge already fits that bill perfectly. For most of the rest, the upcoming generation of 200-mile base-model electric vehicles are luxurious; short of a vacation, when was the last time you drove 200 miles in a single day? Even at 65 MPH non-stop, that's over three hours of driving -- and 50,00 miles / year if that's your daily commute.
And, for basically everybody, a Tesla coupled with their Supercharger network is downright overkill.
We've already got all the technology we need; now, it's just a matter of economies of scale to bring the price just a bit lower.
It's also worth noting that EVs absolutely smoke their gasoline equivalents on pretty much every other metric you could care to mention -- performance, maintenance, noise...you name it, and EVs are better. And, when they cost not much more than the gas guzzlers...well, let's just say that the transition to electric will be much faster than the transition from manual to automatic transmission.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ayn Anonymous on Friday October 16 2015, @04:54AM
You absolute not understand what sustainable practise means.
Not one bit. And so almost everyone else, influenced by *green wash*.
You can't use *anything* from the earth crust in a systematic way.
That's a non-go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natural_Step [wikipedia.org]
You have horizon of a day, a year a decade ?
That's nothing. That's the way of thinking that causes the destruction of the biosphere.
Look at what you are proposing. Can it be done for thousands of years ?
You probably don't know, because you never thought about that time frames.
Yes that's heretical. How can I think in thousands of years ?
Nobody is doing that.
Exactly.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by TrumpetPower! on Friday October 16 2015, @05:26AM
Anything that assumes continued growth is going to be unsustainable at the scale of millennia. But, conversely, even that which seems an insane luxury of conspicuous consumerism would be insignificant if we could mirror the historical 3% growth with 3% contraction until human population levels are at 1% of where they are -- an hundred million globally, rather than the ten billion (with rounding) where we're at today.
Make all forms of birth control free with no questions asked (beyond, of course, medical necessity) paid for with taxes, make IUDs and silicone plug vasectomies required for attendance at public school the same way we already require vaccines, do it on a global scale...and pretty much all our civilization's problems magically take care of themselves by the end of the century.
And, no. There's absolutely zero chance that we'd face extinction because birth control is the norm and only the oddballs have children. Make birth control the default from childhood with the option to reverse for those who're serious about wanting children, and we'll never lack for new generations. It's the current situation that's driving us to extinction....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday October 16 2015, @07:42PM
First of all, thank you for that fascinating link about The Natural Step, I'll look further into it.
About the sustainability of battery technology: any chemical reaction has exactly the same composition of elements as before the reaction (law of Lavoisier [wikipedia.org], conservation of mass, incidentally his books are out of copyright and some are available on Gutenberg).
So you have to ask: how is it done today? what happens to the Lead and the sulphuric acid in my car battery, when the battery died and I exchange it for a new one?
The answer is, of course, that they get sent to a factory where new batteries are made from the broken old one, and only very small losses are incurred in this production cycle, because lead poisoning is a no-no in countries with environmental rule of law.
The same goes for more expensive battery technology (LiFePO4 with Lithium, or Vanadium flow battery).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 16 2015, @11:37AM
This, more than anything, is why the transition to EVs is going to be especially abrupt: they are a dream to drive. After you've driven an EV going back to an ICE is like reverting to horse & buggy. Just plug it in at night and don't worry about anything else, and most people have already developed that muscle memory from plugging in their smartphones at night.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @05:36AM
Do the math:
Um, I was told that there would be no math. Batteries don't do math, so why should I? I don not want the Big Electrics replacing the Big Oil and screwing us just to move from point A to point B. Hey! I had an idea? How about we walk? Maybe with Mormon carts, but it still counts as walking on my smartphone (if it is so smart, why doesn't it know how many wives I have, or at least "had" before wall of mud and water that was in no way God's judgment on my lifestyle and that I am at least 40 years older than my "wives" who just last year were out homecoming queen and head of the (*Y(&#(E)Q#*R_ cheerleading squad. OMG, or OMM (Oh my Moroni, archangel, you see, covers a lot), were we talking about VW?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2015, @02:05PM
You don't appear to be thinking this through, very far. If you're producing most or all of your own electricity, then "Big Electric" can't screw you very badly. The worst that you can be screwed, is if the electric company won't pay you for your excess production. But, I think some laws have already been passed to prevent that. The worst situation seems to be that you buy electricity for X/Kwh, but you sell for 1/2 X/Kwh. But, even so, they can't screw you to terribly if you're producing more than you use.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Friday October 16 2015, @06:06AM
You seem confused about a number of things, Mr. "I so smart, I think to thousands of years out unlike anyone else!" Yes, I read your other post below.
Electric vehicle batteries are so big and so full of valuable raw materials that they will be (are being) recycled to a much higher extent than typical household or personal device batteries have ever been. A lot of people seem very confused about this, but it just makes no economic sense for anyone to discard EV batteries.
Then, you make another common mistake in thinking that "rare earth" materials are rare or will run out in an extremely short period of time. Tell that to the guy building a $5 billion dollar plant to make the batteries his company needs to produce hundreds of thousands of EVs every year for the foreseeable future. Rare earths are quite common and will last hundreds of years even if we don't recycle them, which we will, especially lithium which is the bulk of what we need for batteries. They're called rare earths only because they are relatively "rarified" in the Earth's crust, which means that unlike other materials that can be mined more easily in concentrated form, we have to process through a lot of dirt/ore to find significant quantities of rare earth materials. But they are still abundant enough that we will not run out until long after our civilization has moved on to newer technologies and perfected our recycling procedures. That's really not something that should stop us from moving to EVs and away from petrochemical fuels. Reducing climate change is the far more pressing problem for our civilization right now.
Converting vast quantities of biomass to fuel is a dead end. Except for partially closing the CO2 cycle, it does nothing to decrease pollution. It damages soils by permanently removing biomatter, and wastes land area that should be used for producing food crops. That biomatter should be put back into the soil to build up soil fertility to support more productive food crops. One way of doing that is to use biomass in wood gasification power plants (to produce energy for our EVs) and then put the remaining "biochar" waste matter from that process back into our fields to enhance the soil's ability to hold nutrients and water and support beneficial microbial and fungal life, which in turn helps our plants grow quickly and abundantly and produce nutritious food. Among other very positive side effects this also can help us drastically reduce our use of petrochemical-derived fertilizers and lets us postpone the serious problem of "Peak Phosphorus" as well as reducing the fertilizer runoff that is producing huge oceanic dead zones and dangerous algae blooms that poison our waterways. What I've just described is already being done in various places. We need to do a lot more of it.
We already have an EV that goes nearly 300 miles on a charge and recharges at 300mph. It's working great for everyone who has bought one so far, and the relevant battery technology is increasing in energy density and longevity every year. The comparisons between energy density of batteries and petrochemical fuels are meaningless in practice. EVs are the future and there's nothing that can stop them at this point. You'll be driving one and loving it within 7-14 years, as will almost everyone you know. And many of them will no doubt have "VW" on the front.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:32PM
> They use rare earth or other non regenerative materials that only last a couple of decades on a global scale.
FYI, 'rare earth elements' are not actually rare. [forbes.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @04:23AM
I'm sure the VW execs are foaming at the mouth in anticipation of the green tax credits they can lobby for with electric cars.
I also wonder how Europeans are going to feel when their Diesels get a crappy software upgrade while US ones get a real hardware fix. It can't be pleasant to inhale from the rear end of that cow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @03:07PM
I am skeptical that they can carry over their tax credits in fashion that will help reduce the financial impact of their recent activities.
Irrepairable harm may indeed heal over time; but it will always be taught to students in economics 101 going forward.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Saturday October 17 2015, @01:58AM
Their fuckin electric cars? You mean the ones that will be found to have a hidden disel engine generator inside in 10 years? "Yeah now that you mention it, I found it very odd that the dealership would call us in for oil change every week."
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Friday October 16 2015, @06:49PM
Has anyone tested the cars before and after the firmware fix to see if it really makes a difference in emission per MILE(not percentages)? I would like to see if the carbon, no2 emitted per mile rather then percentages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2015, @07:46PM
I think you can calculate that yourself if you know the fuel economy. The number of miles per gallon is inversely proportional to the number of grams of CO2 / mile. If you know the percentages you can then also calculate grams of NOx / mile.
(Score: 1) by kazzie on Sunday October 18 2015, @06:13AM
We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio.
I didn't know they'd made a film out of it!