Autoblog: Report: EU working to ban gas and diesel-powered cars by 2050

If you want to give your money away to oppressive regimes in the middle east in the future as well I'm sure they accept Paypal.

I don't think thats the number one reason behind this. Ecomentalism is

Plus, you can always buy gas full of twigs and mud from LukOil.
 
EDIT: Also, the Mr. Fusion is only for the time circuit. Doesn't the car still run on the ICE?

Ok if my memory serves me correct, after it was struck by lightning "She'll never fly again", Marty ruptures the fuel lines which doesn't affect the time circuits, but the car has to get to 88MPH using petrol... or a dynamite train.

So i'm not sure what powers the flight. The flying steam train has smoke from the chimney in flight.
 
god damn it, they can't be for real about this garbage

worst thing is I'm sure this will get U.S. congress critters talking about this sometime soon as well.

I think If I ever overhear someone bringing this up, I will troll them by reminding them that the only way to get enough electrical generating capacity to support an all electric fleet is... to build more nuclear reactors. Which is actually fact, as far as I know. I don't see getting all that generating capacity from pinwheels and solar panels at least, which is surely what the eco-loonies want.
 
We should be focusing on hydrogen storage methods so that we can have hydrogen powered ICEs. Best of both worlds.

But anyways, this is a stupid plan. Let the market decide how the transition happens. Battery powered cars are not necessarily the next best step.

Well to be honest, an ICE that burns H just isnt going to cut it IMO. The power density just isnt there, BMW made a 7 series with a 6 liter V12 burning H and its output was around 200-250 ish bhp. Its range was rather shocking too because it does about 50 liters per 100km... meaning its 30 gallon tank is good for around 200-220km. I know that doesnt mean too much because afterall the emissions are zero, but the cost of getting the hydrogen into your tank would be just too high. I think currently you have to put more energy in, than you get out for H. As for current fuel its a bit insane to think when you are filling up at the pumps, theres actually a serious amount of power going through your hands. Petrol and Diesel are so dense in energy, you have multiple kW worth of power going through the nozzel.

We'll have to ween off fossil fuels some time.... we just will, even if they can synthesise it in the lab. But this liquid we use to move about everywhere is sooo power rich and so versatile its going to be hard coming up with a replacement thats just as flexible. Maybe we'll simply never have it as good as we have now... until of course nuclear power advances so far that we can safely have mini-reactors in the boot.


What the fuck!?

Why don't they ban ocean liners instead? They kinda use a bit more oil then a car and is a luxury item, not a necessity.


not sure if I agree because I like going on them. But they do burn the thick black horrible stuff, heavy fuel oil and apart from economizers in the exhaust (basically a waste heat, heat exchange to pre heat boiler water) they dont even have any kind of particulate emissions control or catalysts or anything you might find on a road vehicle. These things are gigantic too so its not like they dont have the space for such systems. I guess maybe in the grand scheme of things, cruise ships are so small in numbers (by comparison) that their contribution overall is tiny. But it did strike me as odd that there seemed to be no pollution controls at all bar just burning the fuel optimally. (and this is on a new ship, the M.V. Azure.... and I asked the chief engineer about all this)

Also they run 24x7, even in port they just sit burning fuel. The damn thing can generate 62MW on full pelt and its got a 40MW gas turbine up in the superstructure which they dont run because it requires marine gas which is very expensive in comparison to fuel oil. (though to be fair I guess the big diesel engines are more efficient overall than a gas turbine and certainly more efficient that car and truck engines... and before anyone says, no gas turbines arent super efficient, they're in the mix with good diesels between 30-40%.... the worlds most efficient prime mover is a sultzer engine, a 2 stroke diesel house of an engine thats efficiency borders on 50%)
 
Last edited:
I'd much prefer it if you bought your twigs from Gazprom, that way I may get a tiny share of the money. ;)
Remember what Dr_Grip wrote, it's not a ban and it's not even a proposal, it's just that Autblog, being staffed exlusively by porcupines, can't read good. However, I firmly believe it would mean a failure for technology, our leaders and indeed ourselves if I when I retire fourty years from now still need to fill up a tank with the liquified remains of plants and animals that died fifty thousand years ago. I hope, and I believe, we will have advanced beyond that by then.

I think If I ever overhear someone bringing this up, I will troll them by reminding them that the only way to get enough electrical generating capacity to support an all electric fleet is... to build more nuclear reactors. Which is actually fact, as far as I know. I don't see getting all that generating capacity from pinwheels and solar panels at least, which is surely what the eco-loonies want.
Troll? No. Why would you need to do that? It's a fact that generating power for the future will need better infrastructure, more wind, solar and hydro power in places suitable for them and far more nuclear fission powered steam turbines to allow us to generate electricity without using up all the oil or dying from filthy coal particles. Fusion power would be great but even my optimism has boundaries.
 
Last edited:
I'm kind of with AiR. When I retire I want to have a fleet of Camaros and various other earth-destroying toys, but I really expect that my daily driver by then would likely be electric or something. There's no doubt that ICE is far and beyond king right now, but with so many alternatives being researched and considered, some already being viable for some people, it seems obvious to me that it will be supplanted eventually.
 
If I'm on vacation in Norway in 2049, I might incidentally decide to stay.
 
If you want to give your money away to oppressive regimes in the middle east in the future as well I'm sure they accept Paypal.
What does using a certain type of fuel have to do with the political system of a specific country? They mine oil in Cali, TX, Alaska, Siberia (lukoil is around here quite a bit), Canada, etc... Not all the oil comes from Middle East and changing a regime can be done if it's really necessary.

Alternatively, you prefer to give money to an oppressive regime in the far east? Quite a few raw materials used in battery production come from China not to mention building of the actual electronics that is almost exclusive to them.

Also known as... setting it up.
Easier said than done. The only viable way of generating enough energy to power an all electric fleet of vehicles is nuclear, fat chance getting anyone to agree to do it after the Fukushima disaster. Other ways of creating power are just as bad if not worse than running ICE.
Well to be honest, an ICE that burns H just isnt going to cut it IMO. The power density just isnt there, BMW made a 7 series with a 6 liter V12 burning H and its output was around 200-250 ish bhp. Its range was rather shocking too because it does about 50 liters per 100km... meaning its 30 gallon tank is good for around 200-220km. I know that doesnt mean too much because afterall the emissions are zero, but the cost of getting the hydrogen into your tank would be just too high. I think currently you have to put more energy in, than you get out for H. As for current fuel its a bit insane to think when you are filling up at the pumps, theres actually a serious amount of power going through your hands.
H based ICE is, for the lack of a better word, retarded. I can see a future in H based fuel cells though, you are still running an electric vehicle with all the benefits and you still fill up like a "regular" car so you are not limited by the batteries.
 
Last edited:
This is the news they decide to announce on my birthday? Damn!
 
Alternatively, you prefer to give money to an oppressive regime in the far east? Quite a few raw materials used in battery production come from China not to mention building of the actual electronics that is almost exclusive to them.
If they were the two only options, yes. China is nowhere near as oppressive as for instance Saudi Arabia. Women are allowed to walk freely, drive cars (on their own! *gasp*), female literacy rate is 86.5% compared to Saudi Arabia's 70.8%, China allows more than one religion (five), and China is more democratic according to the Economist Democracy Index. Yes, there are other states in the middle east that are more developed and offer more freedoms, but as Saudi Arabia is the big player in the region and the 2nd largest oil producer in the world after Russia, it's the country that defines the middle east in this discussion.

Easier said than done. The only viable way of generating enough energy to power an all electric fleet of vehicles is nuclear, fat chance getting anyone to agree to do it after the Fukushima disaster. Other ways of creating power are just as bad if not worse than running ICE.
Disaster? Not by a long shot. The tsunami that killed nearly 11 000 people (as of today) was a disaster. The Fukushima power plant has despite a total loss of cooling caused by a tsunami created by a earthquake that measured 9.0 on the richter scale, a quake that unleashed 39 000 times more energy than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, not killed anyone. The Fukushima hydroelectric power dam that collapsed and swept away 1800 homes according to reports most probably killed at least a few hundred. But that made almost no headlines. Stick the word nuclear in though and you can grind the same claims over and over on 24 hour news channel and charge premium for the ads for months.

Kenan Malik said:
There is growing concern about radiation leaking from Fukushima into the food chain and the water supply. The Japanese authorities banned the sale of certain vegetables from the Fukushima area after discovering elevated levels of radioactive caesium and iodine and advised infants in the Tokyo region to be given only bottled water. But here, too, perspective is needed.

At one point, there was around 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine per litre of Tokyo tap water - twice the recommended limit for infants, although still below the adult limit. It dropped back to safe levels the following day. But even at the ?unsafe? level, prolonged exposure to the water would have resulted in a radioactive dose lower than one would receive from natural background radiation in many parts of the world. According to Richard Wakeford, professor of epidemiology at Manchester University and an expert in radiation exposure, an infant who drank the contaminated Tokyo tap water for a year would receive a dose of around 0.8 mSV. That?s about one tenth of the average annual radioactive dose that people living in Cornwall, in south-east England, receive from background radiation. In some parts of India and Iran background radiation rises to 260 mSV per year, seemingly without adverse effect. Similarly, if you were to eat 1kg vegetables from the Fukushima region everyday for a month, you would receive a dose of around 20mSV of radioactive caesium - equivalent to a single full body CT scan. As the environmental physicist Jim Smith put it, the radioactive safe limit ?is set at a low level to ensure that consumption at that level is safe over a fairly long period of time.? Short exposure to much higher levels ?would not present a significant health risk.? Radioactive iodine is of more concern than other radioactive contaminants because it can be absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children, leading to higher cancer risks. That is why precautions are wise. But panic is not.

There are certainly questions to be raised about Japan?s nuclear programme. Why build a power plant on the east coast, so close to the geological faultline? Why was there no protection from the sea? Why were routine inspections not carried out? And while in the current crisis the Japanese authorities seem to have been relatively open, the history of secrecy and cover ups within Japan?s nuclear industry has helped create neither confidence nor goodwill. But there is no evidence that Fukushima is another Chernobyl.

Chernobyl really was an expression of human hubris. The Soviet authorities believed that they had no need to install basic safety mechanisms ? such as a containment vessel ? in the plant, and plant operators seemed oblivious to the consequences of the tests they were running. Fukushima tells a different story. It reveals the success, not failure, of technology.
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/bergens_japan_quake.html

Cosmo said:
The Japanese quake, which now appears to have been a magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale, released seismic energy yield equivalent to a 474 megaton atomic blast. This released 39,000 times more energy than the 12 kiloton bomb that devastated Hiroshima, and is equal to the force that flattened Lisbon, Portugal, on All Saints Day in 1755. Make no mistake, this was a catastrophic quake.

Despite this, the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, built to withstand a 7.9 magnitude quake, stood up to a seismic event that shook it over 30 times more powerfully than it was designed to survive. It held up to the onslaught, and shut down automatically as the tremors began.

It appears that the 10-metre tsunami that followed is what brought the reactors to the brink of meltdown, as back-up diesel generators for the facility's coolant pumps failed, and the cores began to heat up. Attempts to cool the cores were unsuccessful, and containment buildings blew up as the pressure built.

When a 20 km exclusion zone was declared ? a standard emergency protocol ? the global news coverage frothed with ?NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE?, ?ATOMIC CRISIS? and ?MELTDOWN ALERT?. And how did they deal with the 9.0 magnitude quake? ?TSUNAMI CARNAGE? and ?NATURE'S TERROR?.

These are just the headlines. The actual coverage has often been nonsensical, contradictory, overdramatic and occasionally hysterical. No wonder the public often react with fear when they see the word ?nuclear?.

To say - as some news outlets have - that the Fukushima accident was now worse than the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, just shows how bad the coverage can get, and why people get anxious. Chernobyl was a Russian design without a containment vessel and the reactor core was exposed, on fire, and large quantities of the fuel itself released into the air.

The Japanese reactors are designed to prevent this ever happening; fuel is inside a thick steel vessel, itself within a containment structure that is specifically designed to prevent release of core materials even during an accident such as this. Also, boiling water reactors like the ones in Fukushima are cooled by water which, unlike the graphite core at Chernobyl, cannot burn.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/4149/full

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power by George Monbiot

There's also the http://fukushima-answers.com website with answers from nuclear professionals instead of confused journalists.
 
Last edited:
Disaster? Not by a long shot. The tsunami that killed nearly 11 000 people (as of today) was a disaster. The Fukushima power plant has despite a total loss of cooling caused by a tsunami created by a earthquake that measured 9.0 on the richter scale, a quake that unleashed 39 000 times more energy than the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, not killed anyone.
You can disagree on the terms if you like but the Fukushima was level 5 of 7 (7 being Chernobyl) and while its not necessarily a disaster in the amount of damage/death toll it's a disaster for nuclear power. The TMI power plant had almost no impact on the environment yet that was one of the main reasons why US has not built a new nuclear power plant in the past 40 years or so? (not 100% on the timing)

The actual impact of the failure of the plant is irrelevant because the public will have seen this as a state of the art nuclear power plant that went into near meltdown plant. It doesn't matter that a hugely rare and improbable event caused that condition and it doesn't even matter that it produced minimal impact. As an example my mother and I had a discussion right before the tsunami about nuclear power and as soon as she heard about the Fukushima plant she was saying how she was right and nukes are bad. Add to that the fact that ecofags (who are mainly behind the whole ban ICE movement) think that anything nuclear will destroy the planet by mere utterance of the word and we have a very bleak outlook for nuclear power.

You seem to think that I'm against fission power, I am not, I'm all for it I just don't think that with public perception the way it is we are likely to see it used as much as we really need it.
 
It'd be pretty pathetic if we still had to fill up with dinosaurs 40 years from now. I want to wizz around in electric cars that go like stink and avoid giving money to despotic rulers in hot places.

This.

Pretty much. We have the tech to move over now. It's just a matter of setting it up. I doubt you'll need a ban. Auto makers will probably be making mostly electric cars by then anyway.

And this.

Fun fact, we don't have power generating infrastructure to support an all electric fleet.

Yet. Say that again 40 years from now.

Also, you can't expect the auto industry to remain the same 40 years from now. This was what a KIA looked like 40 years ago:

mxtMq.jpg


And this is what it looks like now:

cEuXo.jpg


You can't expect cars and engines to remain the same 40 years from now. By then, the car as we all know it will be something completely different, powered by an engine that will be something completely different from what we have now, fueled by something else other than petrol.
 
Yet. Say that again 40 years from now.
When was the last major breakthrough in commercial power generation? The US haven't started building a new station since 1974 and the one that was started in 74 is due to be completed by 2012 (takes a bit of time it seems). With all the public opinion and greenies being against anything thats non solar/wind the situation will be WORSE in 40 years not better.
You can't expect cars and engines to remain the same 40 years from now. By then, the car as we all know it will be something completely different, powered by an engine that will be something completely different from what we have now, fueled by something else other than petrol.
1876 - Nikolaus August Otto invented and later patented a successful four-stroke engine, known as the "Otto cycle"
Care to place a bet?
 
Here's a question, why not crack down on the fucking factories? I mean, if there is nasty looking smoke coming out of the fucking JELLO factory I would hate to see the air near the prius factory.
 
On NPR today they were reporting that the proposed ban is only for city centers, not all of Europe. Banning all fossil-fuel powered vehicles for the continent would cause the supply lines for food, durable goods, medicine and emergency services to cease to exist.
 
not sure if I agree because I like going on them. But they do burn the thick black horrible stuff, heavy fuel oil and apart from economizers in the exhaust (basically a waste heat, heat exchange to pre heat boiler water) they dont even have any kind of particulate emissions control or catalysts or anything you might find on a road vehicle. These things are gigantic too so its not like they dont have the space for such systems. I guess maybe in the grand scheme of things, cruise ships are so small in numbers (by comparison) that their contribution overall is tiny. But it did strike me as odd that there seemed to be no pollution controls at all bar just burning the fuel optimally. (and this is on a new ship, the M.V. Azure.... and I asked the chief engineer about all this)

Also they run 24x7, even in port they just sit burning fuel. The damn thing can generate 62MW on full pelt and its got a 40MW gas turbine up in the superstructure which they dont run because it requires marine gas which is very expensive in comparison to fuel oil. (though to be fair I guess the big diesel engines are more efficient overall than a gas turbine and certainly more efficient that car and truck engines... and before anyone says, no gas turbines arent super efficient, they're in the mix with good diesels between 30-40%.... the worlds most efficient prime mover is a sultzer engine, a 2 stroke diesel house of an engine thats efficiency borders on 50%)

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to go on a cruise and just relax, but when the time comes we need to lower our oil consumption, why should we, who rely on the automobile have to be the only ones to give in? Why are we always considered the big polluters and all that? All the cars in the world don't even come close to polluting as much as the biggest ships in the ocean.

We do need the oil tankers and container ships for our consuming, but do we really need to get drunk for a week on a cruise ship and waste 80.000 gallons doing so?
 
IMO, cars will always take most of the beating of greenies, because they are the easiest target, everyone has one and most people use them often. But, what annoys me is that this way a lot of other polluters are forgotten, such as commercial transport. Trucks, hauling our stuff around, are essentially running nonstop, so even small efficiency improvements would have quite an immediate impact. Also, if we are moving towards electric cars and saving on fossil fuels, why not ban oil heating in homes and move to electric? An average home in northeast US will go through 50-60 gallons of heating oil a month, which works out at some 8 tons of CO2 per year, or about as much as my car will produce over 4 years doing 15,000 km a year.
 
Top