The Juice

And pollution!

First off, let's kick the pollution thing in the fucking balls.

Go check the EPA's indices for air quality from 1977 through today.  Actually, we can't use today for two reasons.  First, the shutdown has the website off. (Can you tell when I wrote this?) Second [T]hey added carbon dioxide to the list of things that were pollution.  I remember it being 2010 but most sources say 2012.

Until we got our panties in a bunch about CO2, air quality was steadily improving, and this is despite steadily increasing use of all forms of fossil fuel.  Gas, Diesel, Natural Gas and Coal!

So burning more gasoline didn't increase air pollution with regards to oxides of nitrogen, sulfur compounds, and particulates.  All of those things went down.  We can thank computer controlled fuel injection for most of it.  Precision fuel metering that comes with fuel injection is just one small part of the massive improvement too!  The largest improvement from an emissions point of view is there's no gas washing the walls of the cylinder of lubrication (called wash-down).  This lets the rings seal the piston better so there's much less gas escaping into the crankcase and nearly no oil getting up into the combustion chamber where it doesn't do any good for anyone.  Catalytic convertors that don't choke the engine and are thereby left in place keep those oxides of nitrogen and nasty sulfur compounds in check.

What we've managed to do, in my lifetime, is get engine exhaust to very nearly be JUST water vapor and carbon monoxide.  The really nasty things have been reduced to traces instead of significant parts.

What's that got to do with energy storage?

Petroleum is an energy source.  Gasoline has excellent energy density and is relatively easy to store and handle.

Batteries and hydrogen are not sources of energy.

Hydrogen has lots of handling and storage issues and has a much smaller energy density than gas, so you can't go as far on a given fuel volume.  It's main disadvantage is that you have to expend energy to make it.  More than you get back in a perfect reaction let alone adding in the inefficiencies of a motor vehicle.

Batteries are even worse about density and the losses from generation and storage.

Where does the power we're storing in batteries or hydrogen come from?  Power plants.  Power plants which at present are mainly coal fired.  Burning no gas and replacing that use with burning coal doesn't really change pollution.

The greenies are working hard on eliminating coal fired power plants by declaring pollution standards with no basis in engineering let alone science.

The same greenies have already all but killed fission power plants.

So where are we going to get this energy?  Wind and solar are proving to be the shitty pipe dreams that only a greenie or politician could keep saying are truly alternatives to fossil fuels.

Science and engineering don't care how you feel.

The source of all this stupid whining about burning things for fuel comes from the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate.  Since the temperatures are tracking with the output from the sun not the energy consumption rates of man; don't even try blaming man.

But while we're talking about pollution, let's talk about batteries.  Nickel and lithium are dirty to mine and refine.  And nobody talks about how making plastic consumes both energy and petroleum and we're not even getting to use the left over aromatic portion of the crude if we can't use it for powering our cars.