California to set up a $1B electric car network

I meant that I assert that the profligate use of fossil fuels harms people whether you realize it or not. But it obviously doesn't feel like an activity you should be blamed for, because no specific people are harmed, much, by such actions.

It's not merely automotive enthusiasts who do such things. Nearly everyone thinks they're a special case. That really worries me.

To get a sense of the scale of things, the north pole ice-cap has receded so much in the summer that the increase albedo is putting incredible train on the greenland icecaps. If they melt, hundreds of millions of people in low lying coastal regions, such as Bangladesh, will be displaced. It could be averted if people refrained from heating all of their massive homes in winter instead of wearing a sweater and driving in two tons of steel and glass to get to the shopping mall and riding in a Lamborgini or an SUV or a big F-500 truck because it feels good to them. Because it almost doesn't matter what happens to technology in the next few decades, unless our attitudes change, we will find ourselves in a major environmental mess.

There's a lot of research funding going into biofuels right now, but unfortunately the basic numbers don't make sense for biofuels as the world's primary energy source. You can convert solar energy into carbohydrates, extract the carbohydrates and convert them into ethanol, transport the ethanol to thousands of gas stations (sitting on prime commercial real estate), and combust it to create pressure that's harnessed to rotate an axle. There's a significant percentage of waste at each of those steps, and you end up requiring, like, all of the Earth's surface area for growing biofuel crops. (Even with algae.)

Alternately, you can harness sunlight directly, distribute it across the existing grid (fairly unobtrusively), temporarily store it in batteries or capacitors, and directly power an electric motor with it. Electric storage also benefits from the same economies of scale as laptops and cell phones.

My opinion, a humble one, is that biofuels are better suited for niche applications where electricity can't be used.

Ethanol requires using fertile soil and in turn edible food into weird fuel.