We are going to see a culling of the herd over the next 20 years. Electric will expand, gas and gas taxes will increase dramatically as the CO2 reduction's urgency emerges. Smaller engines might do better - huge gas hogs might not last as prices increase and demand decreases.
Many will buy used cars and car lives will increase as more repair what they have.
Yes, I agree, it all depends on the power rate. A savvy owner will install a home power bank that can be charges at the best rate, and have a faster charge capability. I expect many stations will be converted to the highest best use for the property. Chargers do not need prime strip locations because the cars will come to them, so they can spot them in here and there as the power distribution grid warrants.
Of course, power sellers greed will want to grab some of this, so I anticipate regulators will also have a role.
Where I live (Montreal), a few gaz stations have been replaced by condos. There are still way too many stations, and they always seem empty, but presumably still lucrative.
Outside the cities, increasingly gaz stations also have charging stations. It only takes a bit of space, and it's subsidized.
10% of new vehicle sales are EVs (in the province), and it has doubled for the past 5 years. We're getting there :)
When the cheap deal on Churchill falls expires. When renewed, as per the agreement, the price will be adjusted and Newfoundland and Labrador will get more $$, and they will be able to export power via UHV cable to the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Falls_Generating_Sta...
The Democratic Party has promised to strangle US energy availability, so prices will continue to go up. (Their strategy to fight climate change is by forcing energy companies out of business and closing pipelines.)
I think there is an overlaying of various trends. The first successful ecars - the Teslas - have shown the way. The first ecars were made to fail so that the car makers could cite the lack of demand. We will not see Detroit and others making serious contenders (once their fires from being too cheap are done)
I don’t necessarily agree, since this depends so much on the political agenda and peoples willingness to accept a lower standard of living.
The energy density of fossil fuels is remarkably more energy dense than the best battery tech we can come up with, and I don’t see any scenario where the grid supports the average person filling up the equivalent of ~20 gallons of gas or ~600kwh of energy in under 5 minutes without superconductors and some other Star Trek league tech. Now expand that to trucks and aircraft that fill up hundreds or thousands of gallons of gas in a matter of minutes; it’s just a complete fantasy that EVs will meet our transportation needs at this point.
The average commute is 25 miles round-trip. Less than 2% drive > 100 miles a day, and far less than 1% drive 150+ miles.
Most EVs have a 300+ mile range with several pushing 350. It would work as a commuting car for 99% of the population without needing to charge except at home overnight, and the average person (25 mile round trip) can go over a week between charges.
Saying EVs can't replace gasoline-powered cars is nonsense.
Trucks - same thing. The Tesla Semi is said to have a 500 mile range on one charge fully loaded with 80k lbs, and it's the first iteration.
Aircraft - no, li-ion is too heavy. We know it won't work for planes. But replacing gas-powered cars and trucks would make a big impact.
I'm curious if we can synthesize hydrocarbon fuels to meet air travel demands. It seems like a difficult (and expensive) process to scale but if we don't have the surface fleet to worry about is it feasible?
For this to matter, you'd have to drive your car more than its capacity per day. Otherwise you just plug it in overnight which is far easier than even filling it up at a gas station once a week.
The current-production "HEMI" engine heads are flatter and more complex than the 1950s–'70s Hemi V8 chamber. The combustion chambers are no longer truly hemispherical. It uses a coil-on-plug distributor-less ignition system and two spark plugs per cylinder to shorten flame travel leading to more consistent combustion and reduced emissions.
As the engineering involved in new engines has improved and evolved, the true hemispherical chamber has morphed and twisted into more sophisticated and complex designs that are meant to extract more power, with lower emissions, from any given combustion event.
Why do boomers think turbochargers are some kind of conspiracy?
When I was younger my dad's friends thought my Mitsubishi Eclipse was spearheading an invasion of crypto-imperial Japan, and now the "New World Order" is trying to take away their gigantic, heavy ass cast-iron engines? A turbo six Charger would still be fast enough to kill you and several bystanders. If it's superior handling and gas mileage upset you, you could always weld a couple of boat anchors to the front bumper. :)
It depends. The Mitsubishi 4G63T mentioned by the parent was pretty solid. Even most of the aftermarket turbos sold for it were reliable too. I've had good experiences with Volvo turbos too.
A lot of it is how the cooling and lubrication is set up. Many turbos use engine oil lubrication and cool the bearings the same way, which can easily degrade oil additive quality prematurely, since that bearing is heated by 1000*F exhaust gases and running around 200k RPMs. Change your oil early (~5k miles, earlier than most manufacturer recommendations) and use full synthetic and they should last. Oh, and don’t run right up to the redline constantly…
Yeah, certain turbo powerplants are AMAZINGLY durable. The 4G63T, 1JZ-GTE, and 2JZ-GTE are all standouts: stout, overbuilt, iron-block Japanese engines.
For lighter aluminum-block turbo engines, I'm a fan of the 4B11T (in my daily driver, an Evo X) and the BMW B58 (with continued development, I think it will become the greatest inline-6 of our time, this generation's 2JZ).
>Why do boomers think turbochargers are some kind of conspiracy?
Boomers grew up seeing Japan besting US cars and the subsequent job losses, etc. All following the 70's gas shortages, and so on. It probably felt like a conspiracy.
Tell me you've got no experience with 70s and 80s compact cars without telling me you've got no experience with 70s and 80s compact cars.
There's a reason imports had a tin can reputation to overcome.
The fuel crisis gave the Japanese brands a foot in the door. Detroit had to take languishing compact car platforms that were only available with poverty spec trims feature sets (because the target buyer was someone who's #1 priority was low cost) and bring them up to snuff with the features and comfort the average buyer wanted. Japan had those products ready to go. They weren't "beating" anything until the mid to late 80s. The boomers didn't grow up seeing Japanese cars out-compete. That didn't happen until they themselves were well into adulthood and bought a bunch of Japanese commuter cars in the late 80s and 90s.
The 80s decline of Detroit was just the collective bargaining and corporate management hens coming home to roost right at the same time that environmental law was really hitting US industry hard.
I could argue statistics, but what matters if we're talking about why people think it's a conspiracy is the perception. I was there, and that was the perception. I'm also not sure why Japan having what consumers wanted and the US car makers not having it doesn't count as "besting".
GM's market share dropped faster after 1980, but it had already dropped 10% between 1964 and the early 70's. That's not nothing.
Domestic manufacturers did a really bad job rolling out turbos. Oldsmobile tried it in like 1962 with the Jetfire. Was a pretty sophisticated setup, an adaptation of aircraft technology from the previous decade, on brand for the makers of the "Rocket". Unfortunately ethanol injection was too much for US consumers to keep up with and meltdowns of the aluminum blocks was common. Most of the fleet had the turbos removed.
I've got a 2019 Ford Ranger with a 2.3 liter turbo 4 cylinder. 27 mpg on the highway, 0-60mph in under 6s (with a tune and premium gas), and tows 7500lbs.
It's remarkable, but there's so much skepticism. Everyone else in its class is a V6 that puts out less hp, less torque, and worse gas mileage.
That V6 is a lot cheaper up front, has a 0% chance of needing a $1500 turbo thrown at it in the mid 100k mile range and probably gets better fuel economy if you drive it with the skinny pedal on the floor all the time. You're not the target customer. People who only buy single cab 2wd trucks in white and a half dozen at a time are.
I have owned turbo cars and have added turbo's to cars that didn't come with them. They reduce reliability and greatly increase complexity. A bonus is higher cylinder pressure and more heat. Changes to EGT's can effect the emissions as well.
IMO turbo cars are very dirty "under boost". Often turbo cars are tuned rich (more fuel) to prevent detonation. They can have great emissions just cruising around, but the second you build boost....not so much.
I ran methanol/water injection to help keep things cool which was a nice solution, but not for the average person. From my research this would improve the emissions as well. I was able to run more timing advance and slightly leaner fuel ratio as a bonus.
Getting a turbo rebuilt is a pain. As a 30-something boomer I avoid turbo engines if there is a large displacement option.
Can you build a gas 4cyl turbo car that can hit 200,000 miles? Certainly. Can you do it at the same cost as a non-turbo v6 that can go 400,000 miles? Nope.
> IMO turbo cars are very dirty "under boost". Often turbo cars are tuned rich (more fuel) to prevent detonation. They can have great emissions just cruising around, but the second you build boost....not so much.
Most modern turbocharged cars run direct injection and high metal loading catalysts and target lambda=1 even under boost, which causes tuners' brains to melt upon seeing the factory tune.
Detonation is controlled by less aggressive timing and various direct injection strategies, while high EGTs and NOx are addressed by the high precious metal loading in the cat.
After an extended amount of time in full load these cars will eventually enter catalyst or turbine protection and start dropping lambda, but this is uncommon amongst daily driving conditions (even under boost).
The rest is true, I agree - there is no practical way that a part which spins at 180,000rpm and pressurizes the intake manifold (introducing a ton of complexity to the PCV system, engine packaging, and everything else along the way) is going to be as reliable as a naturally aspirated engine at the same cost. But, if this comes with enough advantages to make the cost expenditure worth it, they can be made reliable.
The latter claim is very subjective, so I'm not sure what to do with that. But a 2mpg difference in fuel economy (eg. 22 mog vs 24 mpg) at $5/gal fuel prices saves about $3000 over 150k miles.
Assuming a 100% chance of replacement at 150k miles, it's still more economical to go with the turbo. And in practice a base turbo-4 ranger is already $3k less MSRP than a base V6 Tacoma.
But beyond economics, the turbo-4 is better day to day than the competing 6. More hp, more torque. More towing capability.
It seems to me like there's a lot of FUD at work here, which is OPs original point.
LOL, flagged first time in 8 years for quoting the article. It plainly has a conspiratorial tone:
"A harbinger of our brave new world order has been revealed yet again"
"There are those who can’t stand that you can get into your privately-owned vehicle at any time of the day or night and drive virtually anywhere you please."
"These budding authoritarians view that and all other forms of personal freedom as threats to their power."
How am I supposed to take this content seriously. :/
I work for a competing car company and I once saw a presentation showing that turbos significantly increased CO2 emissions because the cooling of the exhaust air causes the catalytic converter to operate a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit cooler, lowering reaction efficiency. This can be mitigated by hybrid setups, since you can avoid pumping cold air down the exhaust path on decelerations, but without that, it’s actually not clear that the emissions efficiency of smaller, turbo motors is necessarily better at similar power outputs to larger naturally aspirated engines.
Might have been more NOx, but the presentation also referred to COx. I’m not an emissions specialist, so I might have misinterpreted parts of it. Or it could have been related to combustion efficiency in addition to reaction efficiency.
This is specific to small Turbo engines (eg. 1.1 l three cylinder turbo). They get great MPG ratings in official testing, but in real world usage they perform worse than a larger non-turbo counterpart (for the same amount of power/HP).
It increased CO2 emissions? The cat doesn't touch CO2, it only affects unburned exhaust gases. And CO2 is a primary emission, if it was "significantly" increased then you would also see a significant increase in... fuel consumption. Where else would the carbon be coming from?
This is specific to small Turbo engines (eg. 1.1 l three cylinder turbo). They get great MPG ratings in official testing, but in real world usage they perform worse than a larger non-turbo counterpart (for the same amount of power/HP).
So I think you misunderstand, a turbocharged engine generally produces hotter exhaust due to the gases being run through a compressor, and often have more aggressively set timing than a similar layout aspirated engine. I don't know where you got "the cooling of the exhaust air" from?
Exhaust gas runs through a turbine, hence 'Turbo'. Typically this cools exhaust. Whether or not the higher combustion temperature from the compressed inlet gas makes up for this is not known to me.
Exhaust gas is hotter on turbo engines. It’s why you have to watch exhaust gas temperature like a hawk when off road. High revs with little movement causes EGRs to melt down. 450-650C.
I acknowledged that this could still be true in my comment, but that I would have to actually do some analysis. However, what the parent comment said is wrong. Your gas is going to lose internal energy to shaft work as it moves through the turbine, which then compresses the inlet air.
Not saying its not hot or hotter, I'm saying the air is not moving through a compressor (which /would/ heat the gas as it does work on the gas to move it to higher pressure), it moving through a turbine, which is recapturing the internal energy of the exhaust gas to improve the efficiency of the engine.
>EGTs are usually measured close to the head. This provides a much quicker response time as well as a more accurate reading. In fact, the temperature of the exhaust gas following the turbocharger can be as much as 200 to 300 degrees lower than the temperature upstream of the turbo. Air resistance caused by the turbo itself can also cause increases in the temperature upstream that would not be detected past the turbo.
The comparison was originally EGT for turbocharged engines vs non-turbocharged engines.
Yes, the temps right out of the head are higher before the turbine vs after for sure, but temperatures going into the cat converter are still generally higher in a turbocharged application compared to an aspirated engine.
I was just salty I got down voted or 'Flagged' or whatever. I completely believe the turbo's higher combustion efficiency means higher temp downstream of the >Turbine<
'hot' vs 'hotter'. Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding physics, when flowing gasses do work, they decrease in temperature. They might increase in velocity, but they decrease in temperature.
Turbochargers do not compress exhaust air, they compress intake air using already-expanded escaping exhaust gas. It is possible this restriction preserves (localizes?) some heat but based on my very, very basic understanding of thermodynamics I would expect some exhaust heat to be "lost" to the work of compressing the intake air. I'm not sure how this would manifest. In the end I suspect exhaust gasses are still hotter in a turbo setup but as a side effect of ramming more air through the intake and burning more fuel per cycle.
Turbochargers take exhaust pressure and convert it to intake pressure. The normally work on a ratio of about 2:1, where 2 pounds of back pressure (exhaust pressure) is converted to 1 pound of intake pressure. Since this pressure(and gas expansion) is normally wasted (except in aircraft where it can be used to propel the craft forward) it is a consider more efficient than supercharged setup.
Increased charge density from >atmospheric pressure causes faster flame propigation and pushes the fuel closer to its knock point when compressed.
Turbos also run a richer mixture under load to cool the intake charge.
Richer mixture and a comparitively later burning and therefore hotter exaust stream increase exhaust temperature (along with the ability to produce more power aka burn more fuel)
Except that you then hold the exhaust gas in a big aluminum tube past a cooled bearings and other things that pull heat out of a naturally low mass thing.
I'm admittedly not a fan of Stellantis, but knowing Dodge they'll give the Hemi one hell of a sendoff. They already have the crate Hellephant, wonder if they'll try to cram an emissions legal version of that in a Charger/Challenger/Durango?
Ford still makes crate engines based on the 302 & 351, and Chevy still makes small & big block engines despite the fact that these architectures aren't in any production vehicle (the LS series of engines are based on Chevy's small block, but there's so many changes it may as well be a new architecture). I don't see why Stellantis wouldn't keep producing a small line of V8 engines for enthusiasts.
Dodge is great at running with an old design and milking the hell out of it. Currently we are on the “jailbreak” challenger/charger which everyone is excited about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rumours that another challenger (like the demon) will carry the hellephant. However, covid and production issues may have quashed that.
Also, thus far dodge has been clever to ensure no production car has exceeded the 808hp of the demon (red eye and jailbreak are just shy), so the rumours may just be that
I'm kinda-ok with powerplant consolidation. Do we really need 4-5 different big-displacement V8s? The GM OHV Small Block family is already the go-to answer for the aftermarket; it should be the same for OEMs. Maybe that requires a change in how car companies view IP, licensing, and the value they add as product integrators.
Totally understandable. It's pretty sad to me, but people nowadays doesn't want sport cars, they want SUVs, and companies will orient what they sell to those products that can sell easily.
Also, we have to remember that Dodge, Ram Trucks, Jeep, Chrysler, and Fiat, as part of Stellantis, are going to share parts with the other brands, and that means not only to lose some parts designs that sell less, but also could make some brands to disappear, and if they don't do that is due to heritage.
At least in the US, what some years ago was the FCA group had and have more coherence than their actual European team makes, and sell different types of cars in their different brands.
Hemi was always a marketing term anyway. My 1970 Honda also has hemispherical heads. So did a lot of 1980s Toyotas as far as I understand. Chrysler isn't getting rid of sports cars or high output motors, they are just sunsetting a legacy sub-brand. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a result of declining sales anyway.
Good riddance! I live in DC and the streets are riddled with bad drivers. Invariably the worst are driving Chargers, high on their own gas fumes.
I used to own an ‘84 LTD with a 5L V8. Its horsepower was more modest than today’s hyper optimized engines, but it could still peel out of any parking lot and cruise down the interstate, a lot of fun to drive. But it’s a car of the past, and now these terrible Dodge Hemi-roid-rage cars will be, too.
The fact that you don't notice the guys in BMWs and whatnot who do the exact same thing tells me you probably just don't like the FCA (I'm sorry, Stellantis) demographics.
Frankly I think that it's a good thing that there exist value brands that can give people with room temperature credit scores the ability to own flashy sports cars, big sedans and 3-row family haulers.
I’m convinced every metropolitan area will have its share of bad drivers, and the only outlier is country-esque small towns where people are never in a hurry to get anywhere and often drive 10-5 under the limit.
Nah I've lived all over the US (>1yr in CA, TX, NY, CT, MT, ID) and in several major metro areas (>1yr SF, SATX, ATX, NY) and east coast drivers are 1000% the absolute worst.
Most small town drivers also seem be better even in similarly adverse driving conditions (construction traffic, high speed, etc.) which I'm not really sure how to explain. Maybe more absolute miles is helpful?
But beyond that, even in metro areas, east coasters are especially terrible.
"Minor" is a fairly reasonable description IMO; best predictions suggest single digit productivity loss a hundred years from now, compared to a number of existential risks like nuclear proliferation, advanced biowarfare, normal warfare, etc. Of course it's all relative.
Food comes from plants, which require CO₂ to grow. An increase of atmospheric CO₂ leads to an increase in plant growth, proof of which can be easily had by checking historical records which show a direct relation between the CO₂ concentration and the amount of biomass. It is possible that the growth zones will move and that areas which are currently too cold for food production become viable for agriculture - Russia and Canada stand to gain here.
So yes, ageing requires food which should be plentiful. There have been earlier warm periods which saw e.g. the flourishing of the Roman empire. This was followed by a cooler period (during which the Roman empire saw its demise), followed by another warmer period in which the Vikings sailed the known world and colonised Greenland. Grapes for wine were grown in the south of Sweden in those days, these eventally disappeared and the Greenland colonies had to be abandoned when the climate turned colder. Now grapes are grown again in the south of Sweden even though it took the cultivation of a more hardy species (among these a frost-resistent Frankenthaler, I tried to grow it in the west of Sweden but it turned out not to be frost-resistant enough, alas...) to make this possible.
If you don't agree with what I wrote here I'd like to see a rebuttal. Why will there be less food on a greener planet?
rubs face ok so here's the thing. Food grows in topsoil. As an eater of food, you need to know this. It's important: food that does not come from the ocean[1] comes from topsoil. Beef? Cows. Cows graze. Pork? Pigs are calorie batteries. They eat anything. But they don't do so great in bog. Chickens? ....yeah.
The places that you think are coming online as 'greener' locations are places where the soil just unthawed. It's not topsoil. It's not loam. It's moss and bog, where it isn't boreal forest[2]. The land is not usable for agriculture or animal husbandry. Probably won't be for thousands of years. It's the crossfade.
It's also going through massive subsidence as the permafrost melts, and is constantly belching methane. It's a soup of microrganisms, mosquitos, and (scientific term here) gunk.
--signed, a Canadian from a farmtown that was just a lil too far north. (Yes, really.)
[1] before you call loophole: yes, we're running out of that, too. Faster, in fact. Fun times. Those are some empty empty oceans.
[2] Conifers often intentionally (to the extent that plants have intent) make the soil around them acidic; this is because only conifers can survive in this soil.
The territories you're eyeballing as a future breadbasket are often currently boreal. When they're not bog. And the boreal tends to turn into bog. That subsidence. Trees hate it -- they like being vertical.
So, yeah, idk what you'd grow there, unless you eat mosquitos.
You might want to study your farming books again before you write your next condescending rant? It will be a while before permafrost becomes farmland but luckily there is a huge - and I mean enormous - area which has not seen permafrost for thousands of years but simply is too cold for many crops to be grown profitably. If the planet really ends up those 1.5°C to 2.5°C warmer than it is now (but cooler than it has been) growth zones move up and farming those crops becomes profitable where it currently isn't. This is something you know but for some reason decide to ignore only to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies. Why is that? Why do you - and the many with you who show similar behaviour - choose this path of rapture? If you think this makes people who do not follow your beliefs take them more seriously realise that it achieves exactly the opposite: the more outlandish the proposed scenarios of doom, the less likely non-believers are to fall in line.
Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The forest starts where the farmland stops.
Even if you cleared the forest, the soil is worthless. It's been covered in conifers for thousands of years. It's also goopy, as it is thawing. Or sandy. Or simply too acidic.
And while it might be good enough for grasses and cattle grazing one day, that day is not today, nor tomorrow, and in the meantime, you will be quite hungry.
In the medium term: good luck replacing California's food output with northern Alberta's.
Now, one might be able to hasten the soil improvement that with some sort of complex, time-consuming terraforming ('agriforming?') process, but good luck getting that process to scale in a hurry. Or on-budget. (Have fun even making a budget for that.)
Farming is actually just incredibly hard, the land is the biggest variable. It has to be just right. You can't just declare that an area is for food production like you'd rezone a city street for residential. Nature does not care about your lines on maps.
Don't believe me? Look at the last time we tried. The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing.
And who is condescending to who, here? I'm not a farmer. But neither, I suspect, are you. So why do you discount my experience? I'm from the place you were talking about.
My suspicion is that you simply cannot tolerate the ego-dystonicity of ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren. But we did it. You did it, with help.
Check the prices at your supermarket.[1] Check the collapsing populations of insects, birds, and fish. Wait for the unravel to travel further up the food chain. Tag. You're it.
And yes, it's apocalyptic. It really, really is.
If you want to throw textbooks around, please read _This Changes Everything_. Then, read _Under a White Sky_.
You will find them both in the nonfiction section.
[1] Before you get typing: yes, inflation and supply-chain disruption can be symptoms of climate change -- specifically, when both are occasioned by a pandemic, which is the sort of event that becomes more common as habitats are squeezed up against one another. There will be more, faster now. I did PhD work on this, back in '05, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1. Like.
I've traveled through that land for years, in both Europe as well as north-America, because of my studies (majored in forestry) but mostly because I like to be out and about. I live on a farm in Sweden, a country which stands to gain a sizeable amount of profitable crop area if the envisioned temperature increase comes about. The same is, as said, true for Russia and, yes, Canada.
Get off the panic porn and broaden your mind. Read some other authors, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters just to name a few. Read them critically (as in "using your critical facilities", not "through the lens of critical theory") but keep your mind open for the possibility that those authors - environmentalists all of them - are on to something which has been covered under thick layers of ideology.
I won't link to those books, you can find them anywhere books are to be had. The library is a good starting point, otherwise some local book store.
> The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing.
It’s extremely productive land, so whatever extent it “has not been awesome” it has nothing to do with your false claim that we physically can’t increase the amount of arable land.
The reason farming the Amazon has been bad is because farmer’s land rights are in a weird limbo state there, where they’re incentivized to deplete the land as quickly as possible with soy and then stick a few cattle on the soy-depleted land in order to maintain their land claim.
> ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren
If there’s an age of poverty coming, it’s more likely going to be because misguided or duplicitous “environmentalists” succeeded in their goal of enforcing poverty on people with the goal of reducing humanity’s net energy production.
> Check the prices at your supermarket
Oh please; I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the strategy of blaming the inevitable deadweight loss imposed by government economic interference on the progressive cause du jour. Yeah, inflation is caused by global warming and not by the fed increasing the cash supply 30% in a year.
I did not even touch that claim of not being able to increase the amount of arable land. Perhaps I should have, seeing as how I am a Dutch citizen, a country which is world-famous for just that feat. Dutchmen have been "re"claiming land from the sea since the middle ages after all, the word "polder" (which means lowlying articifically drained land) is used beyond the national borders for a reason. There are polders outside of the Netherlands, e.g. The Fens in the UK are a good example - former marshland which is now productive farmland.
The fact that you think GW places us at imminent risk of starvation suggests you're probably not operating on a coherent model of GW risks.
Are you willing to put money on the table? Make me a market about a measurable GW-related food production loss and I'll probably take you up on it, assuming you're willing to commit to it.
Yeah you got me, I'm a fake account funded by Shell. Care to explain your eminently rational model of the costs of global warming, which I'm sure you didn't get from TV?
To be fair, we know it will be a problem, but we don't know if will actually be a big problem or a small problem. Will we have mass migrations? Total environmental collapse? Deserts everywhere? Or will something bigger than climate change roll around to wipe out civilization, like a mass psychosis or WW3?
clears throat as someone whose country includes the Arctic, I am qualified to inform you that 'total environmental collapse' is accurate. Also, post-ex-facto.
You, my friend, are looking at what is colloquially known as a Big Problem.
I tend to agree, but not acknowledging how others feel is a one way ticket to no progress. We have a human problem caused by fear, in my evaluation. The solution isn't fear, its something closer to "tricking fearful people into embracing a future that benefits everyone instead of holding onto fear". As opposed to "Changing peoples fear from war and scarcity to climate change and scarcity".
It's not about the size of the problem, it's about the quantifiable efficiency of mitigations.
In real world, every problem has numerous competing ways of solving it, and the rational way to solve the problem is to quantify the costs, efficiency and risks, and to pick the methods based on it.
The general public's approach for addressing climate change is very far from rational. It looks more like a panic where people desperately chose a random way of inconveniencing themselves, as long as it looks plausibly "green". This has been spearheaded by the marketing departments, where many cost-cutting quality-lowering measures are sold as "green" leading to very measurable and quantifiable profits on one side, and some guilt alleviation on the other one.
There are efficient technologies, such as biodiesels, wind power, carbon capture, that have a net positive impact, and there are others that are more questionable if you consider second-order effects (e.g. limited supply of lithium and pollution from making batteries out of it).
If you really care for the planet, spend your time researching the big picture and making rational and properly weighed decisions, rather than blindly trusted the marketing department that exists solely to make money off your decisions...
> Please, try to hide your excitement about a turbo-six instead of a bruiser Hemi V8
A lot of turbo 6's would absolutely hose a v8 - Ford in Australia learned this when they released the XR6 Turbo with a 4.0L inline 6 turbo, and out-sold and out-performed their flagship 8cyl offerings.
This author sounds like a typical old man yelling at the clouds.
> All this is ostensibly to combat the slowly, and ever-slightly increasing global temperature. The hubris of believing by curtailing carbon emissions we can just “turn the dial” on the global thermostat down a few degrees is shocking but sadly not surprising. After all, the tale of Icarus exists for a reason. A harbinger of our brave new world order has been revealed yet again
...annnnd I'm out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
6.4l engines, 13 mpg. Three good reasons why one rarely sees these in my native Flanders region of Belgium:
- one-time vehicle registration tax: 11.4k€ or about 13k USD
- yearly road tax: 6.5k€ or 7.3k USD
- fuel cost: +- 52 USD/100 miles
The undersigned silly idiot drives his 15 year old station wagon as little as possible and like an old grandmother, consuming 53mpg. The goal: to avoid unncessarily sponsoring Mohammed Bin Salman, Vladimir Putin and similar nuisances, like global warming. He would prefer something resembling solidarity in his quest, by moving cars with engines like this to extreme specialty real use, musea or engine geek clubs outside the public road system.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadOutside the cities, increasingly gaz stations also have charging stations. It only takes a bit of space, and it's subsidized.
10% of new vehicle sales are EVs (in the province), and it has doubled for the past 5 years. We're getting there :)
What does this mean?
Nuclear decommissions? Fossil fuel shuttering? ...?
The energy density of fossil fuels is remarkably more energy dense than the best battery tech we can come up with, and I don’t see any scenario where the grid supports the average person filling up the equivalent of ~20 gallons of gas or ~600kwh of energy in under 5 minutes without superconductors and some other Star Trek league tech. Now expand that to trucks and aircraft that fill up hundreds or thousands of gallons of gas in a matter of minutes; it’s just a complete fantasy that EVs will meet our transportation needs at this point.
Most EVs have a 300+ mile range with several pushing 350. It would work as a commuting car for 99% of the population without needing to charge except at home overnight, and the average person (25 mile round trip) can go over a week between charges.
Saying EVs can't replace gasoline-powered cars is nonsense.
Trucks - same thing. The Tesla Semi is said to have a 500 mile range on one charge fully loaded with 80k lbs, and it's the first iteration.
Aircraft - no, li-ion is too heavy. We know it won't work for planes. But replacing gas-powered cars and trucks would make a big impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Hemi_engine#Third_gen...
As the engineering involved in new engines has improved and evolved, the true hemispherical chamber has morphed and twisted into more sophisticated and complex designs that are meant to extract more power, with lower emissions, from any given combustion event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherical_combustion_chamb...
When I was younger my dad's friends thought my Mitsubishi Eclipse was spearheading an invasion of crypto-imperial Japan, and now the "New World Order" is trying to take away their gigantic, heavy ass cast-iron engines? A turbo six Charger would still be fast enough to kill you and several bystanders. If it's superior handling and gas mileage upset you, you could always weld a couple of boat anchors to the front bumper. :)
For lighter aluminum-block turbo engines, I'm a fan of the 4B11T (in my daily driver, an Evo X) and the BMW B58 (with continued development, I think it will become the greatest inline-6 of our time, this generation's 2JZ).
Boomers grew up seeing Japan besting US cars and the subsequent job losses, etc. All following the 70's gas shortages, and so on. It probably felt like a conspiracy.
There's a reason imports had a tin can reputation to overcome.
The fuel crisis gave the Japanese brands a foot in the door. Detroit had to take languishing compact car platforms that were only available with poverty spec trims feature sets (because the target buyer was someone who's #1 priority was low cost) and bring them up to snuff with the features and comfort the average buyer wanted. Japan had those products ready to go. They weren't "beating" anything until the mid to late 80s. The boomers didn't grow up seeing Japanese cars out-compete. That didn't happen until they themselves were well into adulthood and bought a bunch of Japanese commuter cars in the late 80s and 90s.
The 80s decline of Detroit was just the collective bargaining and corporate management hens coming home to roost right at the same time that environmental law was really hitting US industry hard.
GM's market share dropped faster after 1980, but it had already dropped 10% between 1964 and the early 70's. That's not nothing.
It's remarkable, but there's so much skepticism. Everyone else in its class is a V6 that puts out less hp, less torque, and worse gas mileage.
I have owned turbo cars and have added turbo's to cars that didn't come with them. They reduce reliability and greatly increase complexity. A bonus is higher cylinder pressure and more heat. Changes to EGT's can effect the emissions as well.
IMO turbo cars are very dirty "under boost". Often turbo cars are tuned rich (more fuel) to prevent detonation. They can have great emissions just cruising around, but the second you build boost....not so much.
I ran methanol/water injection to help keep things cool which was a nice solution, but not for the average person. From my research this would improve the emissions as well. I was able to run more timing advance and slightly leaner fuel ratio as a bonus.
Getting a turbo rebuilt is a pain. As a 30-something boomer I avoid turbo engines if there is a large displacement option.
Can you build a gas 4cyl turbo car that can hit 200,000 miles? Certainly. Can you do it at the same cost as a non-turbo v6 that can go 400,000 miles? Nope.
Most modern turbocharged cars run direct injection and high metal loading catalysts and target lambda=1 even under boost, which causes tuners' brains to melt upon seeing the factory tune.
Detonation is controlled by less aggressive timing and various direct injection strategies, while high EGTs and NOx are addressed by the high precious metal loading in the cat.
After an extended amount of time in full load these cars will eventually enter catalyst or turbine protection and start dropping lambda, but this is uncommon amongst daily driving conditions (even under boost).
The rest is true, I agree - there is no practical way that a part which spins at 180,000rpm and pressurizes the intake manifold (introducing a ton of complexity to the PCV system, engine packaging, and everything else along the way) is going to be as reliable as a naturally aspirated engine at the same cost. But, if this comes with enough advantages to make the cost expenditure worth it, they can be made reliable.
> Probably gets better fuel economy
The latter claim is very subjective, so I'm not sure what to do with that. But a 2mpg difference in fuel economy (eg. 22 mog vs 24 mpg) at $5/gal fuel prices saves about $3000 over 150k miles.
Assuming a 100% chance of replacement at 150k miles, it's still more economical to go with the turbo. And in practice a base turbo-4 ranger is already $3k less MSRP than a base V6 Tacoma.
But beyond economics, the turbo-4 is better day to day than the competing 6. More hp, more torque. More towing capability.
It seems to me like there's a lot of FUD at work here, which is OPs original point.
"A harbinger of our brave new world order has been revealed yet again"
"There are those who can’t stand that you can get into your privately-owned vehicle at any time of the day or night and drive virtually anywhere you please."
"These budding authoritarians view that and all other forms of personal freedom as threats to their power."
How am I supposed to take this content seriously. :/
Maybe just delete your comment then, it is distracting
Small turbos get good mpg ratings, but their real world use is different: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109366_small-turbo-eng...
The trouble with turbos: Why fuel economy can be worse, not better https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
Could we be reaching the end of the road for small-capacity turbocharged engines?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/02/could-we-be-reaching-th...
Small turbos get good mpg ratings, but their real world use is different: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109366_small-turbo-eng...
The trouble with turbos: Why fuel economy can be worse, not better https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/adventure/red-li...
Could we be reaching the end of the road for small-capacity turbocharged engines?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/02/could-we-be-reaching-th...
Not saying its not hot or hotter, I'm saying the air is not moving through a compressor (which /would/ heat the gas as it does work on the gas to move it to higher pressure), it moving through a turbine, which is recapturing the internal energy of the exhaust gas to improve the efficiency of the engine.
Because this site always needs ""SOURCES"" https://www.theturboforums.com/info/article/why-are-exhaust-...
>EGTs are usually measured close to the head. This provides a much quicker response time as well as a more accurate reading. In fact, the temperature of the exhaust gas following the turbocharger can be as much as 200 to 300 degrees lower than the temperature upstream of the turbo. Air resistance caused by the turbo itself can also cause increases in the temperature upstream that would not be detected past the turbo.
Yes, the temps right out of the head are higher before the turbine vs after for sure, but temperatures going into the cat converter are still generally higher in a turbocharged application compared to an aspirated engine.
Was I pedantic? Yes. Still salty though.
Advanced timing + turbo = boom.
Increased charge density from >atmospheric pressure causes faster flame propigation and pushes the fuel closer to its knock point when compressed.
Turbos also run a richer mixture under load to cool the intake charge.
Richer mixture and a comparitively later burning and therefore hotter exaust stream increase exhaust temperature (along with the ability to produce more power aka burn more fuel)
Edit: Downvoters, explain yourself.
Dodge is great at running with an old design and milking the hell out of it. Currently we are on the “jailbreak” challenger/charger which everyone is excited about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rumours that another challenger (like the demon) will carry the hellephant. However, covid and production issues may have quashed that.
Also, thus far dodge has been clever to ensure no production car has exceeded the 808hp of the demon (red eye and jailbreak are just shy), so the rumours may just be that
Also, we have to remember that Dodge, Ram Trucks, Jeep, Chrysler, and Fiat, as part of Stellantis, are going to share parts with the other brands, and that means not only to lose some parts designs that sell less, but also could make some brands to disappear, and if they don't do that is due to heritage.
At least in the US, what some years ago was the FCA group had and have more coherence than their actual European team makes, and sell different types of cars in their different brands.
I used to own an ‘84 LTD with a 5L V8. Its horsepower was more modest than today’s hyper optimized engines, but it could still peel out of any parking lot and cruise down the interstate, a lot of fun to drive. But it’s a car of the past, and now these terrible Dodge Hemi-roid-rage cars will be, too.
Frankly I think that it's a good thing that there exist value brands that can give people with room temperature credit scores the ability to own flashy sports cars, big sedans and 3-row family haulers.
Most small town drivers also seem be better even in similarly adverse driving conditions (construction traffic, high speed, etc.) which I'm not really sure how to explain. Maybe more absolute miles is helpful?
But beyond that, even in metro areas, east coasters are especially terrible.
Am I missing something, or does the writer of this article live in an alternate reality where global warming is only a minor problem?
Considering a stock-off-the-lot tesla can absolutely rip a hellcat in a race, you'd think these guys would be all for it.
Neither will its author.
Aging requires food.
So yes, ageing requires food which should be plentiful. There have been earlier warm periods which saw e.g. the flourishing of the Roman empire. This was followed by a cooler period (during which the Roman empire saw its demise), followed by another warmer period in which the Vikings sailed the known world and colonised Greenland. Grapes for wine were grown in the south of Sweden in those days, these eventally disappeared and the Greenland colonies had to be abandoned when the climate turned colder. Now grapes are grown again in the south of Sweden even though it took the cultivation of a more hardy species (among these a frost-resistent Frankenthaler, I tried to grow it in the west of Sweden but it turned out not to be frost-resistant enough, alas...) to make this possible.
If you don't agree with what I wrote here I'd like to see a rebuttal. Why will there be less food on a greener planet?
The places that you think are coming online as 'greener' locations are places where the soil just unthawed. It's not topsoil. It's not loam. It's moss and bog, where it isn't boreal forest[2]. The land is not usable for agriculture or animal husbandry. Probably won't be for thousands of years. It's the crossfade.
It's also going through massive subsidence as the permafrost melts, and is constantly belching methane. It's a soup of microrganisms, mosquitos, and (scientific term here) gunk.
--signed, a Canadian from a farmtown that was just a lil too far north. (Yes, really.)
[1] before you call loophole: yes, we're running out of that, too. Faster, in fact. Fun times. Those are some empty empty oceans.
[2] Conifers often intentionally (to the extent that plants have intent) make the soil around them acidic; this is because only conifers can survive in this soil.
The territories you're eyeballing as a future breadbasket are often currently boreal. When they're not bog. And the boreal tends to turn into bog. That subsidence. Trees hate it -- they like being vertical.
So, yeah, idk what you'd grow there, unless you eat mosquitos.
Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The forest starts where the farmland stops.
Even if you cleared the forest, the soil is worthless. It's been covered in conifers for thousands of years. It's also goopy, as it is thawing. Or sandy. Or simply too acidic.
And while it might be good enough for grasses and cattle grazing one day, that day is not today, nor tomorrow, and in the meantime, you will be quite hungry.
In the medium term: good luck replacing California's food output with northern Alberta's.
Now, one might be able to hasten the soil improvement that with some sort of complex, time-consuming terraforming ('agriforming?') process, but good luck getting that process to scale in a hurry. Or on-budget. (Have fun even making a budget for that.)
Farming is actually just incredibly hard, the land is the biggest variable. It has to be just right. You can't just declare that an area is for food production like you'd rezone a city street for residential. Nature does not care about your lines on maps.
Don't believe me? Look at the last time we tried. The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing.
And who is condescending to who, here? I'm not a farmer. But neither, I suspect, are you. So why do you discount my experience? I'm from the place you were talking about.
My suspicion is that you simply cannot tolerate the ego-dystonicity of ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren. But we did it. You did it, with help.
Check the prices at your supermarket.[1] Check the collapsing populations of insects, birds, and fish. Wait for the unravel to travel further up the food chain. Tag. You're it.
And yes, it's apocalyptic. It really, really is.
If you want to throw textbooks around, please read _This Changes Everything_. Then, read _Under a White Sky_.
You will find them both in the nonfiction section.
[1] Before you get typing: yes, inflation and supply-chain disruption can be symptoms of climate change -- specifically, when both are occasioned by a pandemic, which is the sort of event that becomes more common as habitats are squeezed up against one another. There will be more, faster now. I did PhD work on this, back in '05, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1. Like.
Get off the panic porn and broaden your mind. Read some other authors, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters just to name a few. Read them critically (as in "using your critical facilities", not "through the lens of critical theory") but keep your mind open for the possibility that those authors - environmentalists all of them - are on to something which has been covered under thick layers of ideology.
I won't link to those books, you can find them anywhere books are to be had. The library is a good starting point, otherwise some local book store.
It’s extremely productive land, so whatever extent it “has not been awesome” it has nothing to do with your false claim that we physically can’t increase the amount of arable land.
The reason farming the Amazon has been bad is because farmer’s land rights are in a weird limbo state there, where they’re incentivized to deplete the land as quickly as possible with soy and then stick a few cattle on the soy-depleted land in order to maintain their land claim.
> ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren
If there’s an age of poverty coming, it’s more likely going to be because misguided or duplicitous “environmentalists” succeeded in their goal of enforcing poverty on people with the goal of reducing humanity’s net energy production.
> Check the prices at your supermarket
Oh please; I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the strategy of blaming the inevitable deadweight loss imposed by government economic interference on the progressive cause du jour. Yeah, inflation is caused by global warming and not by the fed increasing the cash supply 30% in a year.
Are you willing to put money on the table? Make me a market about a measurable GW-related food production loss and I'll probably take you up on it, assuming you're willing to commit to it.
You, my friend, are looking at what is colloquially known as a Big Problem.
You feel me?
In real world, every problem has numerous competing ways of solving it, and the rational way to solve the problem is to quantify the costs, efficiency and risks, and to pick the methods based on it.
The general public's approach for addressing climate change is very far from rational. It looks more like a panic where people desperately chose a random way of inconveniencing themselves, as long as it looks plausibly "green". This has been spearheaded by the marketing departments, where many cost-cutting quality-lowering measures are sold as "green" leading to very measurable and quantifiable profits on one side, and some guilt alleviation on the other one.
There are efficient technologies, such as biodiesels, wind power, carbon capture, that have a net positive impact, and there are others that are more questionable if you consider second-order effects (e.g. limited supply of lithium and pollution from making batteries out of it).
If you really care for the planet, spend your time researching the big picture and making rational and properly weighed decisions, rather than blindly trusted the marketing department that exists solely to make money off your decisions...
A lot of turbo 6's would absolutely hose a v8 - Ford in Australia learned this when they released the XR6 Turbo with a 4.0L inline 6 turbo, and out-sold and out-performed their flagship 8cyl offerings.
This author sounds like a typical old man yelling at the clouds.
...annnnd I'm out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- one-time vehicle registration tax: 11.4k€ or about 13k USD
- yearly road tax: 6.5k€ or 7.3k USD
- fuel cost: +- 52 USD/100 miles
The undersigned silly idiot drives his 15 year old station wagon as little as possible and like an old grandmother, consuming 53mpg. The goal: to avoid unncessarily sponsoring Mohammed Bin Salman, Vladimir Putin and similar nuisances, like global warming. He would prefer something resembling solidarity in his quest, by moving cars with engines like this to extreme specialty real use, musea or engine geek clubs outside the public road system.