The big sell
It was Thomas Edison, the great American inventor that invented modern inventing. Before, an invention could lie unused for years, until someone discovered a need for it, usually after the inventor died penniless.
So, it was determined that you have to tell people they have a need that they didn't know that they had. And, you just so happened to have something that will fill that need.
I just saw an ad that is trying to sell us alternative fuel cars. You know, electric, ethanol and fuel cell.
All of these "alternative" cars don't do anything but move the carbon emissions around without really saving the planet.
Let's take them one at a time.
ELECTRIC. Instead of exhausting from gasoline, electric uses power generated by electric plants, which are most likely powered by, coal, oil and natural gas. Nuclear power, hydroelectric and wind power, the true non emissions power sources, consist of less than 7 percent of electricity produced in the US.
Now comes the inefficient part. Batteries take an average of twice the power to charge than they produce. In other words, for every watt-hour that the batteries give, it takes about two watt-hours to charge the battery back.
So, you have an inefficient method of charging, and you still have a carbon footprint because you're still using fossil fuels.
ETHANOL. This is a worse idea, simply because there is so many unintended consequences. First of all, using corn is a bad idea. It takes almost a gallon and a half of diesel just to produce a gallon of ethanol. Then, you have to ship ethanol entirely by tanker truck, costing more diesel. No pipelines, because it evaporates too easily. Now comes the unintended consequences part. Everything on the farm eats corn as a primary part of their diet. And for every bushel that goes to ethanol, that is one less bushel that goes to feeding the animals. Thus, the cost of feeding the animals goes up. And so goes up the cost of food. Eggs, chicken, beef, pork. All more expensive. And we are supposedly saving fuel? At what cost?
FUEL CELL. This is the worst of the bunch. Not only do you have the drawbacks of electric, but it is even more inefficient because you have to electrolyze the water to get the hydrogen. Then, because of the gaseous properties of hydrogen means they cannot be kept under high pressure for very long. Because the molecule is so small, it has a tendency to leak on the molecular level through the vessel. So, you need to fill up on hydrogen on a regular basis no matter if you use it or not.
So, even these "green" cars still have a carbon footprint, even though you are being sold on the opposite.
It just irks me that these cars are being sold as not having a carbon footprint, when actually they have one.