Our country has been through so much in the last thrity years, why don't we put Americans to work and create our own automotive fuels? We could put our Farmers to work truly working to farm corn, send the corn to the desert, and use stills there to make corn alcohol. The heating units could also be corn stoves. The desert would allow us to save heating a great deal during the hot periods. We would need the farmers, general laborers, truckers, and use American products. We could reconstruct the automotive engines using a twenty to one compression ratio with the old-style carburetors increasing the oxygen coming in there and resetting the spark gaps accordingly. It seems to be our best answer in the USA. Why are we NOT exploring such??
2006-11-28 01:30:16 · 4 answers · asked by Eds 7 in Environment
This is called Biofuel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel) and it is a hot technology area to get into these days. One advantage of biofuel is that it removes dependence on foreign supplies that can be geo-politically unstable. Your question seems to point to government actions to do something. The best hope is not for direct government action, but for government to set the policies to encourage a free enterprise system to make this happen.
Another advantage of biofuel is that it has a net zero increase in carbon emissions, i.e. it takes carbon out of the atmosphere to make the fuel and the carbon is then put back into the environment thru the burning process; whereas fossil fuel releases carbon that was stored from millions of years ago.
On the opinion that electric car is best for the environment; this is a myth. Today 60-70% of the electricity is produced by fossil fuel, and this is not about to change anytime soon. Electric cars that can be plugged into your AC outlet would cost more and also would increase the use of fossil fuel. This is because the delivery of electricity is very inefficient when compared to the delivery of gasoline. Efficiency of electricity delivery is a function of the transmission voltage, i.e. the higher the voltage the more efficient the process. From Ohm’s law, the loss is equal to the Current (I) square, times the resistance (i*i*r). For home delivery with 110v, the loss can be as high as 30%, i.e. it just heats up the air and is lost.
As a simple calculation let us use a hybrid car with 50 miles/gallon. It would cost $6 to travel 100 miles (assuming $3/gallon). Assuming that it takes 20 HP to travel 60 mph, that would be 15kW for 1.7 hours (746 W = 1 HP) or 26 kWHr. Today we can pay up to $0.25 per kWHr for those that exceed the allotted power usage. This mean we can expect to pay that amount for charging our electric car. This means the same trip would cost us $6.40, or roughly the same as a hybrid car. Here’s the catch, the electric company does not pay $3 per gallon. They may pay less than half that amount. This means that there would be twice the amount of carbon emission being dumped into the atmosphere. Ill regardless of the exact amount, it is effectively burning up more fossil fuel and producing more carbon emissions.
2006-12-02 11:12:33 · answer #1 · answered by ? 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Over a three hundred and sixty 5 days and a a million/2 in the past, my lady chum and that i donated our automobile, and offered bicycles, and the two get month-to-month bus passes. we live in a community the place there are grocery shops, video shops, movie theaters, and each thing else we would desire interior of a million-5 miles of our homestead, so we purely particularly could use a automobile some circumstances a three hundred and sixty 5 days, and taking a bus is usually a solid thank you to return and forth.
2016-10-04 11:25:41 · answer #2 · answered by ? 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
most answers are in the film "who killed the electric car" www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com
second consider your US centric view (reflected in your "choice" of president)- your country is not "our" country. the need to manage finite resources and pollution is a global one, one country cannot do it alone
(as reported by Al Gore who you did not elect in "An Inconvenient Truth)
There are plenty of technical solutions, but US car regulations require no effort to improve car efficiency, it is worse than China in this respect. and any attempt to change this, as in Claifornia is strongly challenged by the old car industry.
but there are good examples too, building on the GM EV1 (all of which GM has CRUSHED) Tesla, http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php?js_enabled=1, are producing a fantastic zero emmision vehicle which could be fueld on $30,000 of solar pannels
2006-11-28 02:00:30 · answer #3 · answered by fred 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
F*** knows? Too many vested interests I suspect!
2006-11-28 04:51:24 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋