Great thoughts. Ultimatly we may become the final energy sorse. As we overpopulate and consume everything axcept ourselves. Ever see Soilent Green?

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Yes I think that our flying will have to be increasingly curtailed, unless they can efficiently produce synthetic aviation turbine fuel that is roughly as energy dense as kerosine and that is produced using some renewable source of energy and non-fossil carbon. I don't see it happening overnight but I think that air travel will tend to reduce over time, and that the over-land parts of journeys will be replaced by large efficient trains and maybe coaches, and that just the trans-oceanic parts of voyages will be made in aircraft. I think that the energy of the future will come from a variety of sources, not a single source. My guess is that in hot places like mine a lot of buildings will double as solar collectors, and we will generate more of our electricity from the sun and less from coal, but you guys with snow drifts to plough through will be among the last to abandon fossil fuels. I absolutley agree that we should use our oil coal and gas as efficiently as possible in the meantime. I think that there is a clear trend to using smaller, more efficient cars but again I think that they won't all use the same power source. During WW II's petrol rationing they converted a lot of cars to run on "gas converters", coking ovens that sat on the boot of the car and used a fire to drive combustible gas out of waste material. People crossed Australia just burning dead wood from the roadside.

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Sooner or later both oil and coal will run out and yes we will need to make electricity without fire. My point is to use what energy we have wisely as we prepare for that day. Personal transportation and air travel will go because there is no portable fuel to replace oil. If we begin now to adjust using our last energy resource electricity we may survive at some new level. We might have warm homes, electric trains, trolleys. We lived 100 years ago without oil and will need to learn to do it again. At least we might still have laptops. Electric cars will simply exasperate the situation.

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Thanks Frank. Yes, British electric vehicles (EV's)really did fail waiting in traffic with their heaters & lights on. And yes, if the 47% efficiency of coal-fired supercritical turbine power stations falls to 12% at the garage wall then an EV running off that grid releases more CO2 than a diesel car at 38%. Agreed, at first sight, not the way forward. But if running EV's off a purely coal-fired grid today is followed by boosting the grid by non-fossil energy tomorrow & substituting some grid power with locally produced power the day after that, then we still reduce longer-term CO2 emissions. A thought- what really is wishful thinking in some places can be already working well elsewhere. In our sunny flat city you can already buy enough rooftop photovoltaics to run a house & car and still sell more electricity than you buy, for about the cost of a standard family car. It takes about 7 years to pay for itself. Another opinion- getting our total CO2 emission down to a sustainable level is fundamentally more important than the efficiency with which we emit it. It is the main game. Less [coal + oil +gas]. The costs should be compared with the costs of doing nothing (See Stern Report). I say bring on Jerry James Stone's "EV 'pissing competitions'" (Go Chicago!) and give Arlene back her Larkstone charging stations.

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Andrew, my point is to try and get us on the right track and not fall victim to wishful thinking. As I stated a CAR battery has as much energy as 1/2 cup of gas over its entire lifetime. So consider driving your 4000 lb. car with its battery and see how many times you have to charge it to go 30 miles before its extinguished. As for heating an electric car you would need apx. 1320 watts of power or 111 amps. at the inverter. That will certainly suck battery life fast. Now suppose it's freezing out you stuck in a snow drift and must run the heater, lights, and spin the tiers back and forth for traction. Don't think you'll make it home. Reality is what it is a coal powered car at best would be 12% efficient. "Clean diesels" are approaching 40% efficiency. Energy is always most efficient when used directly. Burning coal to boil water to charge a battery is wasteful.

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1Frank your sentiments are clear to me but your reasoning isn't. With the energy a battery "has" do you mean net lifetime gain/loss, or total lifetime power delivered? Your comparisons are spurious- you don't need to charge a battery 100's of times to drive 30 miles. Once will do with a decent plug-in car. You are years too late to be correct about no heating or cooling- Prius and other hybrid electric cars already have heaters and airconditioners and are more efficient over the same trips than "normal" cars, especially on the short trips that people "normally" make most of the time. If you don't trust Toyota's Prius, Mercedes are developing electric cars. Do you think that they will be less safe or less comfortable or reliable than whatever it is you drive? I agree about not using coal to fire the power stations. Let's get back to the science as you suggest- the consensus is that we produce too much CO2. Let's fix it so that we burn heaps less of that coal- AND that oil. And one more thing about vehicle size and safety- hitting a person or vehicle with a small car is going to do them less damage than hitting them with a big one- so what is the problem?

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A car battery over its lifetime has as much energy as 1/2 cup of gas. Compare extracting 1/2 oil from a hole in the ground to power a NORMAL clean diesel vehicle 30 miles,vs. charging a battery hundreds of times from an global warming coal powered power plant to drive the same 30 miles in a unsafe, unheated, or cooled or reliable golf cart. Real science should trump opinion when it comes to our future.

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Right on Arlene. I know a man who has put photovoltaics on his roof and he uses them to charge his "Vectrix" electric scooter, which he uses to get himself to and from work. Just to make sure (it's uphill on the way home) he plugs it in at work too so his boss charges him $AU2/week for the power. His wife doesn't charge him for the power he uses at home. He loves it. I took it for a test ride and I love it too. I didn't buy one because they are not cheap, I already have my little Smart car and I don't get photovoltaic panels until later this year. I don't think that there are any official charging stations here (Perth, Western Australia) yet, but most people have an outdoor power socket or two at home, perhaps inside their garages- or, extension cords are cheap... There is a shop near me where you can get your mountain bicycle converted to a rechargeable electric moped that plugs into a standard general power outlet. Do you have those?

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Years ago I used to take the ferry to work, from Larkspur to San Francisco. Being in walking distance of the Larkspur ferry terminal, I noticed others who had to drive there, were provided with plug in stations, to let their cars charge while they were away. I often wondered, who or what stopped that. Why such a resourceful system, was not continued or even prohibited later on.

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People don't really want to fuel their cars with coal. Let's support Google's attempt to get alternative fuels cheaper than the traditional coal-gas-nuke power stations. Internal combustion vehicles are no more efficient if you include the environmental costs and exclude the serious subsidies provided by government to the oil and coal industries. Most trips actually taken in cars are 30km (20 miles) or less and with short trips electric cars excel (there is a major electric car drag-racing industry emerging). For those who require distance capability in the same car, hybrid is the way to go. I am sorry to hear that the USA still can't do better than golf carts in electric cars (or tanks in petroleum-powered ones), but you don't have to buy American- Europe and most of Asia produce very serviceable hybrids now. Americans have been the wrong people to ask about automotive efficiency for a few decades now. An early sign of the trouble that your industry was in was when it sued your government to prevent the introduction of emission controls that the Chinese had surpassed a decade earlier, because they couldn't compete. Why couldn't they? Because they didn't want it enough? Too fat, dumb and happy at the top?

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