Mitsubishi: We've been cheating on fuel tests for 25 years
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As a layman these sorts of reductions always seemed pretty strict to me. It seemed like a backdoor way of banning ICE's.
We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
Tax the fuel, give incentives to renewable energies and batteries, and let the market sort it out.
Or, have the government seriously attack on the research front.
It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever.
The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there, give some fresh university grads in shit economic situations some research to crunch on. Like Manhattan 2.0.
You can't just say to people 'oh, your car is impossible, let's go and sniff each other's armpits on the subway, and you'll have to walk to the countryside'. It just doesn't work.
Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay !
Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering !
Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.
We are in a war, just as we were then. It's just slower and less visible. If we don't fix the energy problem, we are done for.
This is simply the market saying we don't need as many researchers in with Phd's in Universities.
There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.
Apollo wasn't very successful. I say this as someone who is personally an aerospace nut, and owns every space or aviation documentary he can get his hands on.
Apollo succeeded in getting a dozen men to the moon, but it did not succeed in promoting the exploration of space, or creating a great deal of technological innovation which benefited the populace at large (for the amount of money spent). Apollo was also very unpopular, except for a little while between Apollo 9 and 12. Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
From the number of up and down votes this post is getting, it appears that many people agree with you, but even more disagree.
My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
Eh, I'm hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. "No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!", and etc.
> My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It's not at all true that we don't fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).
So what nickff is actually saying is that when considering the Apollo program as a model for the response to the CO2 crisis, it would be important to understand the ways in which it failed the putative goal of human expansion into space. I think that he would view the Apollo program as analogous to the discovery by Americans that the Chinese had succeeded in generating a net gain of power for a few minutes from a research fusion reactor. Responding to this by declaring that the US would build the first commercially functioning fusion reactor "not because it was easy, but because it was hard" might go a long way towards quelling the moral panic brought about by the appearance of Chinese ascendency and American decline, but it might be problematic insofar as sustainable and optimal investment in energy (source) research was considered.
The actual goal of Apollo was 'put a man on the moon'. Which is super cool, but obviously not all that directly useful.
By contrast, a program whose explicit goal is to make batteries better, or make solar more efficient, or bring fusion reactors closer to production, or even just generically 'do some energy research' is a lot more obviously 'good'.
I'm talking about EROEI - the viability of doing it at all.
Private enterprise can play the capitalism game and make it cheaper. But it won't invent breakeven fusion to begin with. The risk appetite just isn't there at that level of investment.
It is possible we will get stuck and need another system to advance further, by going through regressions first.
The risk of going for a clean energy project is massive. It can fail completely, it could work but not return much profit, there are lots of ways it can go wrong.
However - the problem here is that the 'do nothing' state is not static utility. Do nothing results in everything going to shit, with very little variance.
Our capitalist systems aren't really set up to deal with that, it's a tragedy of the commons. That's why you need things like taxes on oil - to force the utility function to accommodate bad things.
Except for the tons more CFCs this would have put into the atmosphere, and CO2 produced from running non-replacement unit. Refrigeration would likely be net positive to quality of life, but it has drawbacks as well as benefits.
Also I completely disagree with the top-down central planning argument you're suggesting. If we threw this kind of money at a better fridge, the government would have created a $10m fridge made by a dozen military contractors and each part made in each of the 50 states. You can't just throw money at every problem at expect wonderful results. The history of government spending proves this. The government is only good at large scale edge cases. Everything else is best served by private industry, free markets, capitalism, etc. There's a reason the Soviets were sending spies by the boatload to copy US chip and industrial designs. They just couldn't create this level of innovation via the top-down command method you think magically works.
If anything, Apollo is a tremendous success on so many levels. Its amusing that you consider putting a dozen men on the moon to be a "meh" accomplishment. I've noticed a lot of younger people have this strong anti-NASA view which is ahistorical and overly critical. Its a shame this level of angry contrarianism is in style as it diminishes the amazing accomplishments NASA was able to do, usually under strict budgetary concerns with endless political meddling.
Among other things Apollo was also really expensive propaganda with a lasting impact. In that context it worked well. 50 years later and the US is still the country that put a man on the moon where probes are generally forgotten outside of Voyager.
Energy research similarly has a lot of indirect value outside of simply changing local emissions. By reducing costs you can push world wide adoption through economics not just politics. And create economic incentives to keep improving things over the long term. That's a lot of leverage and well past what direct spending on 'clean' energy could have achieved in the 1980-2000 timespan.
The story has been swept under the rug as much as possible and I will support anybody keeping it in the limelight.
I think we're scared we won't find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. At least for a few generations. Confronting the reality that society will have a smaller energy budget going in the future compared with the past is a scary prospect for democracy, because it challenges a leg of the "growing pie" assumption.
What matters is EROEI with externalities included (e.g. energy cost of carbon capture or sea barriers or whatever).
But even if we play that game, in the UK we already pay something like a 75% combined tax rate (probably higher now) on car fuels. So we've already priced in 4x. And household electricity bills are generally trivial compared to stuff like land cost. We can, and will, afford it in monetary terms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Case_for_Fossil_Fuel...
So obviously a book containing some ignorant claims doesn't rule out it containing insightful claims, but rejecting global warming outright is pretty damning - what positive externalities, exactly, does he refer to?
And I don't see any projections where total loss of habitat is on the table. It'll be more like Mesa Verde, where pre-Industrial warming presumably rendered the home of the Anasazi uninhabitable. Even them that's 100 years out.
The more I read about it, the more it seems to me that valuable information continues to be poisoned, clouding our judgement.
See for example the following extracts from wikipedia [1]:
> "Research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost,[20] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times normal levels.[22][23] The excess methane has been detected in localized hotspots in the outfall of the Lena River and the border between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Some melting may be the result of geological heating, but more thawing is believed to be due to the greatly increased volumes of meltwater being discharged from the Siberian rivers flowing north.[24] Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[25] Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[26][27] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2."
Yet in the same section, you know what the introduction text reads currently?
> "Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[17] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.[17]"
So let me get this straight: Because someone found a model from 2007 that makes things look mostly fine, we ignore empirical data from 2008 that shows that a Clathrate Gun of 50 Gt could go off at any time? Please someone tell me how I'm wrong just so I don't have to go crazy here.
So, you want precedent for a loss of habitat? How about [2]? Now look, I'm not saying that this is a certainty. But one has to assign a percentage of risk for this happening. I can't do it, I'm not enough of a modeller, but so far I haven't found any conclusive evidence that would either lead to such a calculation or could tell us with certainty that the risk is close to zero. If it isn't close to zero, I'd argue that we have to do everything we can to make sure it is. Because the insurance policy for a catastrophic damage happening at, say, 1% chance, is worth paying up to 1% of that catastrophic damage. My intuition is, it's way more than 1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_ev...
There are many stories out there documenting the rapidly falling prices of renewables across the world. The problem isn't economic, it's political.
I was sort of trying to get at this with:
>> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
I used to live in Central London and you could smell the diesel fumes in the morning. I'm very familiar with particulate emissions.
Kill ICE's and we solve both.
> >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
which isn't true. Moreover, you didn't really give an argument for why this shouldn't be tackled at both ends of the problem. The smell is the least of our worries with particulate emissions.
http://www.spike.com/shows/life-or-debt/episode-guide "Til Debt Do Us Part" - Season 1, Ep 7.
I have living relatives who saw the transition from mules to tractors. It wasn't just nicer, it meant killing yourself much less slowly. Yes, they are that old, and they all look like tintypes from the 19th century - that gaunt, hollow look that working that hard gives you.
That's a pithy defeatist statement. Personally I got a job at a renewable energy company. There are many avenues you can take to help tackle climate change.
You proving me wrong would the best possible outcome.
In general, yes. But there are different ways to burn your fuel to generate different amounts of other bad stuff. You want to tax these more directly.
But a tax of $1 per ppm multiplied by the annual number of miles driven will create powerful demand by consumers for lower taxed cars, and the car makers will do what they can to meet the demand.
Anyway, the emissions scandal + the rise of EVs, will finally make all manufacturers try and push as many EVs on the market by 2022, when the new Euro 7 standard is official. They will need to lower their "fleet's" emissions, and the only effective way to do that is to push as many EVS into the market as possible.
So in the end these regulations served their purpose. I'm happy for it.
I absolutely support government-funded research into improving automobile technology. As you say, clean energy is critical. The obvious place to focus energy research these days is on storage technologies from small scale chemical batteries to large-scale potential-energy solutions. We have the technology to generate clean energy relatively cheaply today, but we're missing the storage solutions to even out cycles in wind and solar power, and the continent-scale electricity grids we need to efficiently distribute the power to where it's needed.
"Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually.
Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible.
Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function.
The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions.
This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat.
[1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere
If you can't build petrol cars that meet emissions standards, you must build electric vehicles.
Also, the current electrical grid (at least in the US) can easily support 100% of light vehicles if they all transitioned to electric vehicles. The DOE did a study on this about 6 years ago. Need more power? Build more solar and wind, and use electric cars to soak it up.
Studies and predictions are nice, but to build it and make it work takes decades. We have a massive infrastructure in the country. And of course, it won't work the way we planned. Everything changes and pivots, not just SV startups.
No, no it does not. Existing overnight electrical generation can satisfy replacing every internal combustion vehicle with an electrical vehicle, today, in the United States. Any statements contrary are outright lies.
But the bigger problem is that you simply can't take a long trip on battery only, without significant delay. I take a twice-yearly trip that takes about 10 hours in a car, with two small kids. That would be hell in an electric car.
This isn't so obviously true that it can be asserted without justification. Based on the statistics I'm seeing from the EIA, replacing every light-duty automobile in the USA with a Tesla Model S would increase demand on the electric grid by more than 50%.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=96&t=3
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=gasoline_...
http://insideevs.com/dont-worry-us-grid-capable-of-supportin...
"The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated that the grid’s excess capacity will support over 150 million pure electric vehicles.
150 million means that nearly 75% of the vehicles on our roads today could be electric and the grid would have the capacity to support them all."
That leaves 25%, right? Right. Considering this is three years ago, it doesn't take into account the rapid expansion of solar and wind generation capacity (which is ~98% of all new generation capacity in 2016). The production tax credit has been extended for another 6 years; you're only going to see more wind and solar projects on the horizon.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/The-U.S.-Solar-M...
“It took us 40 years to get to 1 million installations, and it will take us only two years to get to 2 million,” said Dan Whitten, vice president of communications at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). “This is a time to mark when the solar industry started to accelerate at warp speed.”
"At the end of 2015, the U.S. solar market hit a total capacity of 27 gigawatts. That represents just 1 percent of the current U.S. electricity mix, but it could triple to 3 percent by 2020. This year alone, the U.S. solar market is projected to grow 119 percent, which represents an additional 16 gigawatts of new installed capacity and more than double the record-breaking 7.3 gigawatts added in 2015."
Did you know they give wind power away for free in some parts of Texas because of the excess power they can't transport out? Delicious, clean wind power for electric vehicles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/business/energy-environmen...
So! You said my assertion wasn't obvious. I concede that is correct. The statistics you're seeing from the EIA are grossly inaccurate for comparing internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles when you compare how much more efficient an electric vehicle is.
I stand by my thesis: the current US electric grid has sufficient generation capacity to support 100% electric vehicles
That I find myself restating this over and over is just a testatement to how effectively Electrical Vehicles have been marketed.
It's certainly not zero right now, but we're up to 11% hydro/solar/wind[0], so it seems like it likely is cleaner, and it's getting better at a faster rate than ICEs are.
Not to mention retooling factories. They can't just spin around on a dime and start making electric cars instead of gas ones.
Oh, and where's the charging infrastructure for everyone to drive an electric car? The Tesla stations are great, but they still take 30 minutes or so to fully charge a car. Go look at the throughput at a busy gas station and imagine every one of those people waiting 30 minutes. They'd basically never get to leave the gas station.
Auto jobs are going away, but that's an argument for basic income for another day.
Retooling factories can be done quickly. It only took Tesla ~10-14 days of downtime to retool from Model S-only production to Model S and Model X. Electric vehicles are so so much easier to produce than an internal combustion vehicle, as its only a battery and electric motor for a drivetrain.
Charging infrastructure? Every home with at least 100amp/220V service is a charging station. Not to mention every Tesla destination and Supercharger station.
You can't taking a company with a 50+ year infrastructure built around doing one thing, tell it to stop doing that overnight and expect it to stay in business and continue employing 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way.
What planet do you live on?
> That's how the law works
I think you meant that's the fairy tale "we" tell the little people.
Hopefully the next time you break the law by willingly jaywalking there will be a cop around to take you to gaol.
If you want that, you can go to Europe or China.
Frankly, your suggestion is as ridiculous as a judge sentencing you to a career in pouring concrete for sidewalk repairs, because you let a tree root upend your sidewalk and caused a trip hazard.
A judge simply can't sentence free-spirited US citizens to do work favoring some politician's political platform.
First, there is a strong economic case that, if an activity harms society as a whole, policies that raise the cost of that activity to a level commensurate with that harm are good policies.
Second, it has been demonstrated time and again that keeping gas prices low is an ineffective and wasteful way to help the poor.
Third, as the price of gas rises the value of older, less efficient cars falls, so buyers of second-hand cars won't be too badly affected. Of course, it's a different matter for those who already own an inefficient car.
The high gas prices though create a huge incentive for people to change their lifestyles and avoid high carbon priced goods. People that switch to a fuel efficient vehicle or just ride a bike instead get to keep their revenue from the tax cut and their savings from using less/no gas.
In what was referred to as "one of the largest corporate scandals in Japanese history", Mitsubishi was twice forced to admit to systematically covering up defect problems in its vehicles. Four defects were first publicised in 2000, but in 2004 it confessed to 26 more going back as far as 1977, including failing brakes, fuel leaks and malfunctioning clutches
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Motors#Historical_t...
Basically, I don't trust them further than I can throw them.
Besides, this latest scandal goes back 25 years, and we definitely have made large strides in fuel economy over that time. (Though much of the gain has been offset by things like increasing vehicle weight for safety & comfort)
"Investors responded by pushing Mitsubishi shares down by 10%. The fuel test scandal has now erased half of the company's market value, and its shares are sitting at a record low."
Shouldn't a 10% drop in their shares result in a 10% drop in the company's market value? Not 50%? I don't know much about this kinda stuff - please be chill.
The mentioned latest 10% drop brings them down to about 50% of their market cap before the scandal broke.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/01/27/business/lower-t...