Looking for Algae--the Next Voyage (Linux Journal)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 12:08 UTC (Wed) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
In reply to: Looking for Algae--the Next Voyage (Linux Journal) by jordanb
Parent article: Looking for Algae--the Next Voyage (Linux Journal)

Off topic...

...so they justify it with the placebo of energy efficiency, just like Prius owners justify their desire for a big, dirty sedan by sticking a bunch of batteries (full of nickel) into it to reduce gas mileage.

IMHO, the point of a Prius is not efficiency, but low emissions.
You can look at the results of emission analysis, or you can do a quick test yourself: try to clean with a paper handkerchief the inside of the emission pipe of a Prius. You'll see (after some rubbing) that the paper gets a bit grey. Now do the same on another car, the paper gets black just at touching the interior of the pipe...
Anyway, the Prius has better emissions than anything else now, perhaps excepting methane powered vehicles.

Actually, I found out that the Prius in some way sacrifices efficiency in order to get lower emissions: it is virtually impossible to get good efficiency in the first five minutes of driving with a cold engine, not just because the engine is cold but because the car insists in warming up the catalyst fast!

Honestly, I don't know if the lower emissions, on a global scale, balance with the need to dispose (or, hopefully, recycle) the battery components when the car will get too old. I think that, being so massive, the batteries should be easier to recycle than in other cases (cellphones?). And anyway I expect this car will last way longer than the typical PC!

Looking for Algae--the Next Voyage (Linux Journal)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 12:17 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] (3 responses)

[even further off-topic]

has anyone taken a look at the resources expended over the lifetime of *any*
vehicle including final recovery? Meaning, is there really anything at all
about a clean, fresh, kinda nerdy but fun car like a Prius that justifies
the impact of manufacturing it in the first place, vs driving an old beat-up
5th or 6th hand pickup (4 or 5 time recycled :)

Somewhere I read, (without any supporting data of course) that the majority
of resources consumed by a vehicle over it's duty cycle were consumed in
it's manufacture. That take has always intrigued me, and I can't seem to
get a handle on any solid information. Nor, it seems, is anyone really
interested in answering the implied question.

Electricity guzzling computers, Priuses, and social responsibility

Posted Sep 27, 2007 23:23 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

It's crazy to consider consumption of any one resource when buying something. There are thousands of costs to the world we all care about, transferred ad infinitum through a great economic network. We should consider all of them when buying something. Fortunately, in a society with a free market economy, there is one number that sums up all those costs: the price.

Sometimes the costs aren't perfectly monetized. For example, I don't think taxes today sufficiently monetize the cost to the atmosphere of driving a car. But over time, they'll get there. (Or I'm just wrong -- maybe the air is worth more to me than to other people).

A co-worker recently made a proposal to replace a lot of CRTs with new LCDs based on the electricity savings. His numbers showed the world is actually better off with us keeping those CRTs (the reason he made the proposal is that he misunderstood the time value of money and thought the figures showed the opposite).

When the world gets serious about global warming, electricity will cost more, and some of these decisions will go the other way.

dust to dust

Posted Sep 28, 2007 7:26 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

take a look at http://cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/ it's got a study showing the total energy cost of various vehicles, including manufacturing, driving, and disposal costs

if correct it has some interesting results

among them, a hummer H1 is cheaper then a honda Prias, in part because the hummer is designed to last 300k miles compared to the Prias 100K miles

dust to dust

Posted Oct 5, 2007 2:58 UTC (Fri) by dmag (guest, #17775) [Link]

Just for the record, that report is was not scientific at all. They use a lot of "secret formulas" and get a lot of facts wrong. (For example, claiming that the plant that makes the batteries is turning Canada into a wasteland.)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/03/20/1858204.shtml