this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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The USA sustained a huge horse population pre-engine. While quality of life was lower, the horse energy cycle was totally renewable.
The issue of industrial farming using oil, is a separate problem, and one that eventually will have to get addressed. Either through some innovative battery technology, or alternative fuel like hydrogen.
But even in pre-engine United States, horses weren't one for every person, they're relatively rare, because they're expensive to maintain, they eat a lot of food right, they require daily upkeep, veterinary care etc huge capital investment.
I think in the right green sustainable system, people would live close enough to where they work, where they wouldn't need to travel vast distances every day. So in the infotech economy, that means people work from home, no commute needed. Just food delivery which could be batched, buses, or even the rare horse-drawn cart for a neighborhood.
The rural population that commutes a distance to work, factories, manufacturing, those would be the hardest to adapt to a non-vehicle lifestyle. I'm not sure how you could do that without moving a lot of people.
One possible reason people don't like rural living, is if you got all the rural people to live in a city, it would raise city housing prices, and if they were invested in property that might be to their advantage.
I think the best way to solve the problem is to start offering better sustainable vehicle (this doesn't mean electric per semi) id like to see ammonia powered cars or better hydrogen cars, these are things that we generate everyday and have a clean output, also I would love to see car company's retrofitting old cars over building completely new cars as this would dramatically lower the environmental impact of car production, which is the highest envirmontal impact of cars.
The hate for the hydrogen fuel cycle in the green communities just confounds me. In my mind it combines the best of all worlds, excess solar wind capacity hydrolyzes water bam hydrogen, portable dense fuel. Solves a lot of our problems
I think it all comes down to them being lied to and told electric is the way.
Yeah. I think there are lots of vested interests making compelling rhetoric.
Rare earth metals cornered by China globally, so that battery technology is just a play by China to become an energy exporter
Oil and other historical hydrocarbons, controlled by the petro states
The one battery technology that looks kind of promising are sodium batteries, but I haven't seen enough data for me to make a real decision yet.
The engineers I talk with, more or less, agree that hydrogen is the future, if you can get production costs down. Part of the equation, is looking at market rates today, rather than future infrastructure. Right now there's more renewable capacity than can fit on the grid by two x in the US. That capacity could be used to generate hydrogen....
So when I do talk to people in the green spaces about hydrogen, I get the rhetoric about its more expensive today, so the cheapest way is to use hydrocarbons... Conveniently ignoring the vested interest, and the consumable nature of electric batteries which are net worse for the environment long term
And honestly batteries are too expensive today lol, I manage a farm and I couldn't imagine the electricity costs for charging all my tractors everyday, not to mention the need for more because they couldn't do the jobs as long as my diesel tractors could. We use farm diesel which is significantly cheaper than road diesel and its cheaper than charging multiple tractors
But, If I could just have a hydrogen tank and convert them all to hydrogen it would be no difference
One difference, you lose about 10% of the energy density with hydrogen, so you'd have to refuel a little bit more often. But I think that's close enough that it's good enough for most applications.
Yeah. I think most people are not aware of the energy requirements of industrial machinery. There's a huge difference between gliding a car across well maintained concrete with wheels, and moving literal tons of earth out of the way.
There is a reason we have not seen backhoes, tractors, bulldozers, moving to batteries. Batteries just are not energy dense enough
I'm confused by one thing, we should be seeing countries without domestic fossil fuels moving to hydrogen for their Air forces. Just as a domestic security issue. Unless they've been doing it really quietly, I've missed it. There is one demonstrator flight transatlantic flight from France to the USA using hydrogen fuel. But that's all I've seen. I would really expect China to be going 110% on hydrogen for their air force. Germany too for that matter. Any rich country without domestic oil, which is fair few of them
But, Russia has Domestic oil and China and Russia best buds.
Sorry all my points are broken up I think of them sporadically lol
Also a gas or diesel powered engk e can be converted to hydrogen meaning most current cars could be converted for less than the cost of buying a new electric car. This makes it more possible for people going forward.
This isn't co.etely inaccurate however the popation of the US has gone up dramatically and requires a different scale of horse feed production because we would have dramatically more horses for example
in 1910 which is when peak of horse population happened there where 27 million horses the works out to about 1horse per 4 people which would mean almost 100 million horses today
That is huge. But we can ignore the people living in urban areas, because they have the public transportation everybody so hot about.
So we're only looking at double the horses. I personally don't think horses are the solution here.
I've been to parts of the world where vehicles aren't common, and there is a rural population, and the way they deal with it is their life just sucks and they don't go anyplace and they just get by. Seems like a rude thing to force on people living in your own country.
end devil's advocating
I genuinely believe people are adaptable, and no matter what happens they're going to make a way to live. So if combustion engines go out of favor, we'll figure something out, if vehicles themselves are become impossible we'll figure something out. It's just going to be very painful process.
I think public transportation makes sense with high population densities, but when you're talking about very rarefied densities it actually makes sense to give the few people vehicles. I understand there's a lot of sentiment in the " f*** cars " community, but if you actually talk to them, and narrow it down, it turns out they like ambulances too. So there is a space between nobody can have a vehicle, and everybody has a vehicle.
But online, people get caught up in the rhetoric, the anger, and they just downvote without nuance.
People are crazy, but, I agree entirely, I also think that the government shouldn't make car owning illegal for anyone but, it should be up to individuals to figure out what to do with it. If a guy living downtown new York wants a car he should be able to buy it but, its up to him to figure out parking