It is indeed an eye-opener. But crude oil lasted for a bit over a century as our fuel, our driving force, and I can't help wondering how long it will be before (for example) all this planet's lithium has been extracted. Not to mention oil once again. Another century? Maybe then we'll make batteries out of seawater, then spend the next century slowly watching it dry up.

I can only say that things must look quite rosy on that reddest of planets, Mars!

Yep. I wonder if we'll use all the water making hydrogen. Someone said to me "but you get the water back. Burning hydrogen makes water!"...:facepalm:

I thought "oh my god. These people actually walk among us". You will NEVER get back more than a fraction of the water you split to make the hydrogen. Because it's been BURNED.

So will someone in the future say "hey mum, why did they use up all the water?"

We need a new, novel, consistent, fossil fuel free means of generating electricity that works 24-7 at any scale and with no dangerous waste management needed. Thinking caps on everyone.

maybe we could recover all the plastic from the sea bed and process it?

I even wonder about wind and wave turbines. Surely each turbine removes a tiny bit of force from the wind or the waves. If we remove enough force, what could that eventually do to the jet stream and gulf stream?

Yes it sounds far-fetched, but I bet the idea of polluting the whole earth's air with car exhausts did too in say 1900, or with coal smoke did in 1800.

Ultimately, the sun is our only truly free energy. We just need to find a better way to capture it. If we get it right, we might even solve global warming.

I've made a start - well half a start. When I still had a Desire with little sunroofs, I bought a pair of solar panels which were the same size as them. Didn't get round to fitting them and my current car doesn't have sunroofs, but I will make use of them somehow.

I'm not sure how the original Autoexpress findings were arrived at, but the overall theme was inline with the results I got from looking on the Greenncap website, setting the year to 2020 & sorting the results on 'Clean Air'. I did this as the original article was dated Mar 2021.
https://www.greenncap.com/assessments/
If you set the year to 'all' , the results will include 2021 & you get a slightly different story with electric cars in the first 6 places, but still diesels are near the top so the original theme still holds.

Charging points & grid capacity aside, very little attention seems to be getting paid to the overall environmental 'footprint' of producing electric & hybrid vehicles. We are in effect, simply shifting the environmental impact from the places the vehicles are used to the places where the rare elements such as cobalt, lithium & carbon needed for batteries etc are sourced.

(13-02-2022, 07:31 AM)Zion Wrote:  I thought "oh my god. These people actually walk among us". You will NEVER get back more than a fraction of the water you split to make the hydrogen. Because it's been BURNED.

Hahaha.
Have a look at the distribution of IQ among any population, 50% of the people are below average intelligence.

(13-02-2022, 10:25 AM)saskak Wrote:  Have a look at the distribution of IQ among any population, 50% of the people are below average intelligence.

Is that something to do with averages in general? :-)

Well, am I missing something here then?  If water is split by the application of energy, it produces hydrogen and oxygen. If hydrogen is then burned (i.e. reacted with oxygen), it results in a release of energy and the production of water.

"The most important benefit of using hydrogen as a fuel is that when you burn it, the byproduct is just water" - a quote from "Six things you might not know about hydrogen", from the Argonne National Laboratory -
https://www.anl.gov/article/six-things-y...t-hydrogen

Maybe it is sour grapes for me, as I cannot afford one of the EVs. We simply cannot consume our way out of this, whether this is electric vehicles or something else.

I had a quick back-of-the-fag-pack kind of calculation, currently 40M vehicles in the UK, multiply this by say £30,000 for an average EV, you get £1.2trillion. If we are to replace all our vehicles with EVs by say 2035, that means that we as ordinary people need to fork 120bn on average each year and every year replacing our cars. Second-hand market does not quite work with EVs and I looked into this quite a bit, as I was thinking of buying a really cheap second-hand EV, replace the batteries and voila. I dropped that idea.

EVs are great, I really like them, but overall they reduce the environmental impact of cars by not that much, still a reduction though. I hate to put links to some random sources, but John Cadogan presents it in a funny way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNgumArGQdw (~11min for the saving of CO2 of electric vehicle over petrol ones).

(13-02-2022, 10:43 AM)cancunia Wrote:  

(13-02-2022, 10:25 AM)saskak Wrote:  Have a look at the distribution of IQ among any population, 50% of the people are below average intelligence.

Is that something to do with averages in general? :-)

Well, yes, normal distribution to blame here, but it was a statistical nerdy-type joke I read awhile back and it seemed appropriate in Zion's context.

(13-02-2022, 11:08 AM)saskak Wrote:  

(13-02-2022, 10:43 AM)cancunia Wrote:  

(13-02-2022, 10:25 AM)saskak Wrote:  Have a look at the distribution of IQ among any population, 50% of the people are below average intelligence.

Is that something to do with averages in general? :-)

Well, yes, normal distribution to blame here, but it was a statistical nerdy-type joke I read awhile back and it seemed appropriate in Zion's context.

Yeah, guessed that was the case, hence the smiley. 
But you do get twice as much hydrogen as you do oxygen in water.