Look to the Chunnel, the train designed to transport cars & their passengers under the British Channel to the continent. Surely this is the way forward for long journeys: Drive your electric car to the nearest cheap electric train heading in the right direction, then let the train do the work. When you near your destination, be it a business meeting or Auntie Flo’s, drive off the train & to your destination. This then solves the problem of not being able to drive over 300 miles in a single go. Who knows, perhaps you could also pop a little charge into the car at the same time?

Plus don’t forget a high-speed train – think of the French tgv, introduced a couple of years ago in North America – can travel at well over 100mph for extended periods, whereas a driver in a car has to slow down frequently and stop. Trans-America at very high speeds, quite legally…

Makes sense to me. Any thoughts?

The basic problem I think we’re all talking about is how to convert and store solar energy in a way that’s suitable for personal transport. And oil is just a great and stable way to store solar energy, which is why nature has evolved that mechanism. Respect the evolutionz.

I expect biodiesel to become a viable alternative, and one which will have a relatively low impact on food prices. And it’s also a case where the technology increase is at the point of fuel production, rather than at the point where a consumer buys a new car. I think this will be hugely important in marketing renewable personal transport outside the US, where it really could take a LONG time for people to afford a Tesla, but where it will be relatively easy for people to run their W123s on Bio.

But hey, yay for multiple technologies.

Fuels should be treated as an energy transport mechanism, not an energy source. All energy on this planet comes from the sun (save the contribution of radioactive decay to geothermal energy). Fossil fuels represent billions of years of trapped solar energy. That energy should remain trapped.

That does not mean internal combustion engines need to go away. Existing engines can already burn alcohol, in varying percentages. New engines should burn 100% alcohol, which can be either ethanol or methanol. Both can take advantage of the existing liquid fuel infrastructure.

Ethanol can be manufactured from plant matter. Most of the energy required comes from photosynthesis. Any additional energy can come from cleanly-generated electricity (which is ultimately solar, whether it’s wind, tidal, or whatever). All you need to do is use the right plants (i.e. not corn), that don’t require fossil-fuel based fertilizers.

Methanol can be manufactured by running a fuel cell backwards. You need a supply of clean electricity to produce hydrogen from water and to power the cell. Carbon dioxide is also required, which comes from the air (and released when the methanol is burned – it’s completely carbon neutral). There are also some promising means of producing hydrogen biologically.

Hydrogen itself can also be used as an energy transport mechanism, but it would require a new infrastructure, unlike alcohols.

Electricity is just too hard to store compactly. It should be used as a means of generating more portable fuels, not a fuel itself, for applications like long-range vehicles.

Discover did an article recently that covered this:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/17-secret-sauce-of-hi-tech-obscure-metals/?searchterm=rare earths

What I got out of it is that there’s lots of capacity, at least for the moment. However nothing is infinite and if electric cars really take off, well, the car market is pretty big. A giant new market for Lithium batteries could make the supply/demand situation look different in a few years.

Here’s my question, from a northern perspective. We have long cold winters where I live. Batteries take a big hit in performance when it’s cold. Some people use so-called battery blankets to help with cold weather starting (although these are far less popular than block heaters, for reasons that are unclear to me). An electric car, that would seem to be courting trouble in such an environment, no?

Just how practical are these electrical vehicles in a place where it’s cold 5 months of the year?

You’re not going to find any published critique of Lindzen’s new paper because his paper isn’t even in print yet (just in press). There have been a few early blog reactions to it, e.g.:

http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/lindzen-on-climate-feedback/
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2009/08/quick-comment-on-lindzen-and-choi.html

As for believing Lindzen just because he’s from MIT, there are many climate scientists at prestigious institutions who come to opposite conclusions. For example, you might point out to your friend that there are plenty of other smart researchers also at MIT who disagree with his estimate of climate sensitivity, e.g. this paper (with, by my count, 12 authors affiliated with MIT):

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI2863.1

You can also search Google Scholar for the published rebuttals of his earlier version of this claim (the “infrared iris”). Not to mention his publication list full of angry rants against the global warming “myth” which, some might say, raise doubts about his impartiality.

Coal has a much higher C/H ratio than oil, so more carbon is burned to release equivalent energy.

Getting back to cosmology, though, a question for the physicists:

What proportion of Earth’s Li is from the Big Bang, as opposed to being produced in SN spallation?

I think there’s some confusion in this sentence. Based on using oil-fired electric generation, the Tesla gets an equivalent of 100-150 mpg. In this case things are cleaner because the power plants have more sophisticated cleaning than individual gas cars. However, based on charging at night, one marginal Tesla, in most markets, will result in ZERO additional electricity being used; there’s generally much excess capacity at night.