Tire Tracks: Dear Mother Nature, Blow Me

I think a responsible energy consumption strategy is well overdue, but selling these policies to the public with the same tactics used to sell designer clothes isn’t going to work.  Environmentalism is trendy now, but the worst part about it is that we are ignoring technologies that provide viable solutions in favor of ensuring that your neighbor knows you’re a goddamn environmental hero. 

The problem is that cars are consumer products, and no one cares why you buy them.  Cars only contribute about 20% of our energy consumption.  This is significant, but not enough to take sole responsibility for the overall human affect on the environment.  No one seems to care about curbing the size of mansions, which gobble resources in heating and cooling as fast as a whole fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs.  I’m not asking the artists in the world to stop cutting down trees to make their stupid drawings, so I don’t see why I need to abandon my hobby of building fast cars.  We are consumers, both commercially and in terms of resources, and we need to learn to do so responsibly.  Understanding how cars, and our way of life, realistically affect our ecosystem is the only way we can create a strategy that practices realistic energy conservation.

First, let’s start with the movie The Day After Tomorrow.  I’d like to find the producer and give him a solid punch in the dick.  He’s probably not responsible for this mass hysteria, but it would still make me feel better.  Climate change has been part of our environment for as long as we've had an atmosphere.  Did the dinosaurs blame their own farts when the climate wiped them out?  (Actually, cow flatulence contains enough methane to be more harmful to the environment pound for pound than our worst modern cars.  This is not a pro-vegetarian argument; they are still stupid.  This is just to illustrate that cars aren’t the biggest contributor to pollution).  Now, on the other hand, I think it is equally as ignorant to claim that we can’t affect the climate.  So, the biggest problem is our ability to understand how the climate is shifting and what portion is related to our activities.  I’ve heard a lot of theories, and I've seen a lot of models, and not a single one reasonably predicts future trends.  And the reason is simple:  science is a business too, just like selling cars, and getting grant money for bad science pays the bills just the same. 

Meanwhile, internal combustion is one of the greatest engineering achievements of the modern world.  It is an incredibly versatile technology that is not easily replaced in terms of its balance between power, range and driveability.  Yet, everyone is ready to give up on gas engines claiming we haven’t made any progress in the past 35 years.  On the contrary, we have come a long way from our pre-1973 high-horsepower, single-digit fuel economy muscle cars.  We now have the ability to balance power and fuel economy.  And it took incredible innovations in automotive design, innovations too numerous to list here.  Our current PZEVs (Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles) create the same emissions in 200 miles of use as is created by grilling two hamburgers.  That means that while a bunch of hippies get together around a campfire, light up a couple doobers, and talk about how bad cars are for the environment, I can commute to work all week and we’ve done the same damage.  This is great progress in engine design over the past couple of decades, but our future does not rest in gasoline alone.  I think it is foolish to abandon it completely, because we will need to have a variety of mobility technologies powering our various needs.

I’m pretty sure most people don’t actually understand the advantages, or lack thereof, of ethanol.  As all the racers know who have been burning alcohol for years, ethanol works in our internal combustion engines, but burns a little hotter, which makes pretty good power.  What the public doesn’t know it that the energy density of ethanol is about 30% less than gasoline.  That means if you can harvest 30% more energy from a pound of gasoline than a pound of ethanol.  Which gives it worse fuel economy.  Why are we pushing for this as an alternative fuel?  It reduces our dependence on foreign oil and allows us to harvest fuel in our own country.  Dissenters say that if we were to produce all of our fuel from ethanol it would take up 97% of our country’s landmass with cornfields, so it is therefore impossible for us to gain energy independence from ethanol.  However, first:  sugar cane produces a much higher yield percentage of ethanol than corn.  Secondly, the idea of true energy independence without a major breakthrough in science is as foolish as wrestling alligators for a living.  I’m sure most of you know that the largest export of Saudi Arabia is oil.  Any idea what they import the most of?  Gas.  They don’t have the facilities to refine it, nor do they plan on spending the money to set them up.  It’s a global market, get used to it.  So really, ethanol just shifts our energy dependence to Brazil, who produces the largest amount of sugar cane (and has been running a large portion of cars on it for a while).  So, ethanol isn’t going to save the environment, but it could help us curb the cost of gasoline.  Ah, crap.

We can run internal combustion using hydrogen gas.  Hydrogen is one of the few fuels that has a higher power density that gasoline.  And there are a couple auto manufacturers working extensively on it.  But distribution to the public is still a problem.  Same problem exists for hydrogen fuel cells, or joining hydrogen and oxygen to power electric motors.  They are viable solutions and they will be part of future technologies, but they won't be ready soon.  But the auto industry is doing the research now, so the technology will be ready.  Typically two of the Big Three American auto companies are in the top 5 spenders in the world in terms of R&D.  Medical companies round out the rest of the top 5.  An auto company was number 1 in 2006.

The real excitement has been surrounding hybrids and electric vehicles.  I think hybrids are directionally the right step.  However, as an engineering solution, I think we can do better than having two complete powertrains, both electric motors and gasoline internal combustion, in the place of one.  With two systems powering the wheels the car is much heavier than it needs to be.  Weight is the enemy of both speed and fuel economy.  Our cars are incredibly safe these days, which makes them ridiculously heavy.  Manufacturers need to put in all the safety equipment in modern cars not just because of government mandates, but because every accident is a potential lawsuit.  So, hybrids are just not an elegant solution.  And the fuel economy isn’t all that great either.  Its gets about the same mileage as the old Geo Metro, which -- in case you forgot -- disappeared into anonymity.

It’s not surprising then that everyone wants to move to plug-in electric cars, but despite popular opinion, we don’t have the infrastructure to support the technology and it is not a zero-emissions vehicle.  Imagine how often your power will brown out with everyone’s car plugged into the grid.  And it’s crap to claim that people are only going to plug cars in at night, when power consumption is low -- it will take time to strengthen the grid to handle the increased load, which brings up the issue of how electricity is created.  Sometimes electricity is generated using solar cells, hydroelectric sources and wind-powered generators, but these can’t support our full needs.  Most electricity is generated by burning coal, which, while it is more efficient that running individual cars, is still far from a “green” process.  (Yes, even California generates almost 50% of its power this way).  Worst of all is the capability of current battery technology.   It will get better, but let’s take a look of where we are at right now:  the energy density of gasoline is almost 100 times better than that of the battery technology hybrids and electric cars are attempting to utilize.  Incidentally, this is the same crappy battery than runs your cell phone, which won’t charge worth a damn.  For comparison, the energy density of camel poop is 30 times better than that of lithium-ion batteries.  Now, I’m no expert, but I think there is room for improvement.  Don’t even mention the movie Who Killed the Electric Car?, and how much further GM would be to production if corporations, the government, and Satan didn’t step in.  You know who killed the electric car?  You did, asshole.  GM knew they couldn’t sell it and would be throwing cash down the crapper.  Now you want it yesterday.  Make up your damn mind.  Electric vehicles are going to work, but they are not the perfect solution they appear to be.

For some reason, everyone is ignoring diesels.  Europe has been hard for them for years because they are twice as efficient as gasoline engines and no longer sacrifice power while doing it.  Americans picture the old smoky, noisy contraptions that no longer exist.  Convince an auto manufacturer that you would buy a diesel car and that’s a technology you can have tomorrow.  That is, as long as you don’t care if your neighbor knows you are being environmentally conscious.