It ain't easy to be green!

[retrodiva1]

Ok I'm not a tree hugger or a hippie dippie by any means but I do like to do my part. I recycle like a fiend, I compost, I grow veggies, but when it comes to alternative fuel sources CA seems to want to make it impossible for me to go green

Comments

[kailangel]

I was talking to an engineer friend over the weekend who said something similarly frustrating (at this point, I've done no reserach and am just assuming he's telling the truth...). He was saying that the Hybrid is only an illusion of energy-convervatin/eco-friendliness. Apparently the production process for the batteries for the Hybrids are really bad -- and that the decompossion of the batteries is horrible too. He said, and I quote, "It's so bad that you may as well drive a Hummer."

*sigh*

That made me sad.

[retrodiva1]

Indeed but I have heard the same thing about cell phone batteries. It's just like someone not wanting to own a VW because it was a Nazi company in the beginning. One has to pick their battles.

Truth be told there really isn't a good solution but if I could at least get the fuel made out of corn I would really really feel better about it!

[kimberley66]

On the fuels note, my Dreamtime Circus friends are looking into greener fuels for fire performance in general and specifically for BM. Not necessarily good news on that front either. I can't recall the details of the bad, but they're still looking.

By the way, love you and your soap box!

[retrodiva1]

Miss you! Heard all kinds of updates from Mallika on you the other day and I felt completely out of the loop. Will you be round on the 22nd for our party?

[jwz]

A "green" car is like a "low fat" milkshake.

Hybrids are insanely toxic due to the batteries, and the electricity comes from coal anyway. Ethanol isn't a practical replacement unless we used all of the available farmland on the content to grow it instead of food; not to mention that production of ethanol uses more energy than you get out of it. Ethanol is basically just dressed up farm subsidies.

There's no quick fix: there's no magic bullet that is going to allow our car-based society to continue to function. Lacking a fundamental societal change, in 50 to 200 years peak oil will hit and we're going back to the bronze age (after ~5 billion deaths).

But cars are so convenient! So we're fucked.

[retrodiva1]

So what do you think about the EV? Did it have a better battery than hybrids? Then again we could all just go the Monster Garage route. They converted a 60's cool car over to run completely on ion tool batteries. Took almost 200 of them but it was silent as the grave and almost as fast as a hemmy.

[jwz]

I haven't seen "Who Killed" yet. But still, the part that's not sustainable is not so much what the cars run on, as the non-negotiablity of the idea that everyone has a car. People won't accept a world where it's not considered reasonable to commute 100+ miles/day. But that's the world we're going to live in, one way or another. If we're lucky, we'll get to pick how big the die-off is.

[parthenogenocid]

Ethanol is a good option in Brazil where they grow sugar cane, less good in the Midwest where they grow corn, not so great at all in California where we don't grow either, unless they learn how to make it out of some local crop that can be grown at low energy cost.

Most flex fuel cars in the US were made to satisfy government quotas (since flex fuel is easier to make than other alternative propulsion) and have never even been run on E85; often the owners aren't even aware of this capability!

The stuff about hybrid batteries is an urban legend. There isn't anything especially toxic compared to other industrial materials, and the battery is a single unit that can easily be recycled.

Electricity in CA does not mostly come from coal.

Hybrids are expensive to rent because they're in demand, which is good.

There are any number of sustainable ways to run cars over the long term. The simplest is electric cars and electricity from solar, wind, etc.