re: #346 kirkspencer

Watch batteries - sorry, I mean ultracapacitors or battery/capacitor hybrids. They’re right on the edge of having energy and power densities that make them viable alternatives of gasoline.

Batteries aren’t energy sources. They’re storage devices. Somehow, somewhere, the electricity must be generated in the first place. Nowadays, in most of the U.S., battery powered cars are coal-powered cars when you trace it back to the source.

And if that’s what it comes to, we’re hardly ahead of the game. Burning coal produces more CO2 per unit of energy than does burning oil or natural gas.

We have to issue permits for high-capacity long distance transmission lines from the windy zones, (often in national forest or grassland or such) to the nearest fairly big cities. Those can be some ways away.

It’s a bit of a chicken-egg situation. Without wind/solar electricity, electric cars don’t save CO2, or don’t save much. Without electric cars, the demand won’t be there for the new wind/solar electricity.

This calls for government intervention. Yep, I went and said it. Sometimes the free market isn’t quite the answer.

Don’t get me wrong. Often, it is, and yet the govt wants to intervene anyhow. Case in point: in WW1, we nationalized the RR’s because there was a war on.

In WW2, with the lessons of that fiasco still fresh in our memories, we left it to the RR companies to figure out which train went where. We just put in bids to ship tanks from MI to NY, and other traffic got outbid, and everything with high priority, (signaled by plain old money) got where it needed to go.