Sure. Thing is "keeping the economy going" is entirely different from keeping the ecology going. Economies are growth oriented so more is better in most respects. More humans=more consumption/production. Doesn't mean it's good for the planet or even good for humanity in the long term.
General / Off-Topic Electric cars are stupid.
- Thread starter [PS4] Lorenzo Waringos
- Start date
That depends on the definition of biofuel you apply. When you start introducing huge amounts of additional heat into the atmosphere you can synthesise "green" fuels pretty well. There are also ideas with algae farms that may be less stupid if you accept that they won't fuel the world.
What do you think keeps the economy going, it's growth. Without growth the economy declines, not that I am.saying that's a bad thing.
Personally I think humans need a complete rethink on how things should be done. But I am not getting into that as we are skirting with politics.
My intent wasn't to tell you or anyone what to worry about, it was to make it clear that you're just plain wrong about birth rates, and if you're operating under the assumption that most countries are facing declining birth rates, then whatever it is you decide to worry about, it's going to be based on a misunderstanding of reality.
But to take the bait for a second: whether it's a 60% or a 300% increase over 100 years, the more people there are, the more difficult the requirements for a sustainable clean standard of living. The planet isn't growing in size or resources AT ALL. At a certain threshold you won't be able to lift everyone all the way up to an existing (and also always increasing) western standard of living, and instead will have to start pushing the western standard of living down to free up resources for everyone else.
Show me a population forecast dated from 1900 which accurately predicted the population in 2000, and I'll consider taking current forecasting for 2100 seriously enough to compare it to real historical population growth figures.
And again, my point still stands: contrary to your initial post, MOST countries do not have substantially decreasing birth rates. That's the main thing.
Apologies if this is slightly off topic (from the evils of cars)......but once fossils fuels run out planes are smegged yeah? There's no way short of some radical discovery that large lumps of metal can fly without some sort of fossil fuel derived energy source?
Solar (already used in some high-endurance drones) and nuclear (considered plausible enough to take seriously as far back as the 1950s) aren't impossibly far fetched sources of power for aircraft, though synthetic hydrocarbons would likely be much more practical.
Synthetic hydrocarbon fuels are considerably more expensive than fossil fuels, but that would obviously change once the latter gets scarce enough, both through economies of scale involved in producing the former and because of rising costs of the latter.
The overall efficiency of an auto is far below the peak thermal efficiency of the engine that is in it and even if it weren't using peak efficiencies for comparisons are misleading because a pure ICE powered auto will almost never operate in this range while a municipal power generation station will almost never operate outside it. There also losses in getting power from the engine to the wheels in ICEs that typically exceed those involved in electrical transmission and storage, and direct drive electric motors can be placed at/in the wheels in an electric vehicle. Electric motors can also recuperate some losses any time they slow down or coast down hill via regenerative breaking.
In the end, even burning the same fuels in a big, centralized location, then sending the electricity hundreds or thousands of miles, and converting it several times along the way, is still more efficient than burning it in your car.
We are doing something to reduce the population....
We're rushing headlong into disaster without doing hardly a thing to stop it, I'm pretty sure that's going to work.
I do not say anything special.
I simply remember that a few years ago the experts said that the cumulative total of American and Russian nuclear weapons would be enough to destroy several times the planet and the life with.
Then what do you mean?
Fossil fuels are even more deadly than nuclear energy, and 3 of those meltdowns were caused by obsolete/too cheap reactor designs and nuclear accidents aren't the only kind of accidents that can go really wrong, in fact, the worst industrial disaster in history was the Bhopal Disaster.
Unless you constatly have to transport 200 Kg I know taking a taxi is not more expensive than buying a car, then again, the idea is to leave roads for those who actually need it like that furniture trailer you mention.
Where the hell do you live? Even here in Mexico I have no problems using the bus and mind you, they are not fancy.
What about global education and wellfare so we can finally start behaving like an intelligent species instead of breeding like rabbits.
This strategy worked when nobody was sure if they're going to survive the winter and child mortality was 50%. But our medical and nutricional advances in last 100 years ensure survival of even the most unlikely circumstances, yet we haven't (well, some parts of the world haven't) really stopped procreating to offset that.
Yeah, or war would help, of course. We can do war quite well. But that's a temporary solution.
Here we go again...
Western civilization has pretty much checked all those boxes, with the exception of the welfare class who are financially incentivized to reproduce. For the most part, when we talk of over-population on a global scale we're talking about everyone besides western civ, so I'm all for these guys getting educated if that's even possible. Pretty sure that's not what amigacooke was talking about, though.
I'm pretty sure the coming climate issues will take care of the population issue.
I'm firmly with George Carlin on that: the planet is fine, the people are ed.
The efficiency number is for the usable energy for the car, not carnot numbers of the engine; the maximum achieved efficiency (for a low-speed diesel) is cited to be over 54%. This is under optimal conditions for top of the line engines, but it's still a far cry from the claimed "10% at best".
The answer is simple: cannibalism. If you eat the pointless then you don't need cattle and numbers will stabilise. With some creative cooking and a lot of herbs and spices I think we will all (well, not those being eaten) be just fine.
So the next time someone asks if you are rich, they might not be asking if you have lots of money...or that people start pouring gravy over our beloved politicians and asking them to rub sage on themselves.
So the next time someone asks if you are rich, they might not be asking if you have lots of money...or that people start pouring gravy over our beloved politicians and asking them to rub sage on themselves.
We'd need to deal with prion diseases like Kuru first.