Quote:
Originally Posted by Daithi
I didn't vote because their wasn't an option for "I don't know."
How toxic and bad for the environment are the batteries? How is the energy for the electricity produced? If it is primarily based on let's say coal plants then is this energy cleaner than petro burned in a modern cars engine? How does finding, recovering, and refining crude oil fit into this equation? I can make guesses, but the truth is that I don't have a clue.
It also occurs to me that the push for electric vehicles really might be about lessening the influence of oil producing regions such as the Middle East, Venezula, and Russia. Once again, I really don't know.
I don't trust what I'm told by the government; I don't trust big business; I don't trust the mainstream media; and I find environmental advocates are willing to turn a blind eye to facts when they don't agree with their preconceived agenda.
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Follow the money...then follow the guns...
Oil is popular due to the paid for infrastructure. When the car first started out, the US was the biggest oil producer in the world, and gasoline was the biggest waste product from oil refining. The car used the "cheap waste product" and everybody was happy. Steam and electric cars had range limitations, but gasoline driven engines had no effective limitation. Even today, a group of hyperactive teenagers could take a car around the edge of the entire US (around 10,000 miles) stopping every 6-12 hours for 10 minutes to refuel, swap drivers, and attend to the call of nature. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, but you could do it. You couldn't
hope to do that with any other technology. Like with the horse of the Old West, you're free to wander about to your heart's content.
With the road infrastructure, repair infrastructure, and refueling infrastructure in place, what is the incentive to change? Well...
Texas has run pretty much dry for oil, so we can't feed cheap oil to the rest of the US anymore. So oil is drilled for elsewhere in the world, and is often found in places with unsavory governments. This leads to all sort of geo-political problems, which keep getting more and more risky for the developed world. So if we can wean ourselves off of oil, so we can give various despots certain finger gestures, (followed with something stronger, if needed). That's one piece of the puzzle.
Another piece of the puzzle is the Eco-Simp piece. There is a steadily growing portion of society that abhors technology, (they may exclude the internet
) These people seem to really
want to go back to the Stone Age. And the Car is their favorite target. "Get rid of the car. Get rid of the pollution. Make people walk like their ancestors." The new rallying cry is Global Warming. "Scrap the Car and Save the Planet." Or if you must have a car, make in run on some non-polluting technology (never mind that none of them are quite ready for prime time.) The fact that this would limit the mobility of people is either consider a trivial by-product, or a Good Thing, depending on the view of the person involved.
The two combined form a block to change the infrastructure to get away from the oil answer. This may or may not be a good thing, but in some circles it has become a religious thing (to a baldly practical viewpoint), with the usual decrying of alternate viewpoints as evil heretics.
Now the battery technology currently available is quite toxic, although future technology may be much less toxic. Anyways, it's not here yet, so it doesn't help today. But due to the "The World Is Coming To An End" rhetoric out there, any half-baked answer at any price is seen as the Answer, if only we can force it (at any cost, including unforeseen consequences - see US ethanol production, corn and world hunger) into common use.
Please feel free not to trust me. Nobody else does.....
(Ambrose Bierce definition of a cynic - A surly blackguard who insists upon seeing the world as it is rather than how it should be....)