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#2189741 2-Mar-2019 09:55

Forgetting about cars for the moment, what about lorries.

I'm sure I read somewhere lately that battery powered lorries are a non-started for the foreseeable future - not powerful enough to drive a large lorry and can't run for say 8 hours continuously.

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#2189744 2-Mar-2019 10:06

SJB:

Forgetting about cars for the moment, what about lorries.

I'm sure I read somewhere lately that battery powered lorries are a non-started for the foreseeable future - not powerful enough to drive a large lorry and can't run for say 8 hours continuously.

I think thats ok. Humans cannot go 100% green. The Earth manages CO2 and other gases, remember these are natural. Our problem is the level of excess. If we became extremely green car transport wise, there will always be sectors that cannot manage that, but if the emissions were at a level that the Earth can manage, job done.

Lorry wise, use trains which will be more efficient per kg of freight. Lorries for the last mile. Probably lots of innovative ideas to reduce freight.

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#2189761 2-Mar-2019 10:32

tdgeek:

Lorry wise, use trains which will be more efficient per kg of freight. Lorries for the last mile. Probably lots of innovative ideas to reduce freight.

You'd need to lay an awful lot more railway track to only use lorries for local deliveries in NZ.

Personally I think it's already too late and we have passed the point of no return. I'm just glad I'm not going to be around to see the results.

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#2189765 2-Mar-2019 10:38

tdgeek:

Some good points. People also seem to keep reducing the discussion to ICE vs electric. There are other possible solutions for specific needs. Fuel cells, hydrogen, external combustion (Stirling). Fuel cells make electricity from hydrogen but it can also be burned directly as a fuel with minor modifications to the engine. I don't know if Stirling lorries have been tried, but I do know Stirling engines were successfully trialled in busses. Of course, they require the burning of some kind of fuel so they might not solve the carbon problem but they do show that there are different ways of approaching things.

This article from MIT suggests that hydrogen could well be the non-polluting fuel of the future once a good source for it is found. Ironically, one of the best short-term sources is gas, so the government may well have been a little premature in banning exploration for that. I don't know. The idea of using it to produce hydrogen hasn't been raised as far as I know.

In the longer term hydrogen on a reasonable scale can be produced from sea water and solar energy, both of which we have an abundance of. It is also a good way of storing energy, since solar can be used to produce it and it can then be used in fuel cells or burned in generators. One big problem with hydrogen is, like batteries, lower energy density than fossil fuels but I believe that can be worked around in the longer term. Hydrogen seems to be a good fuel option for powering ICE machines doing heavy work.

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#2189769 2-Mar-2019 10:52

SJB:

tdgeek:

Lorry wise, use trains which will be more efficient per kg of freight. Lorries for the last mile. Probably lots of innovative ideas to reduce freight.

You'd need to lay an awful lot more railway track to only use lorries for local deliveries in NZ.

Personally I think it's already too late and we have passed the point of no return. I'm just glad I'm not going to be around to see the results.

Yes, its more a general comment. If rail was on the main trunk lines and other larger towns, that would stop a truck army on the roads at night.

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#2189799 2-Mar-2019 13:27

I would point out that electric trucks and vehicles were used quite a bit in the uk up until after the war. Mind you, so were steam trucks.

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#2189814 2-Mar-2019 14:05

I read that India and China are building hundreds of coal power plants. India predict their electricity demand will triple between now and 2030 and China has even scarier numbers.

Nigeria is forecast to hit half a billion people by 2050 and earths population increases by 83 million per year.

It looks like resistance is futile.

The Greens want us to be carbon neutral by 2030 or something but to do that would mean killing off the entire NZ cattle herd, banning all non electric vehicles, closing down most manufacturing etc. It would plunge many New Zealanders into poverty and joblessness.

It seems some segments of society are hellbent on the climate change nonsense and I see us spending billions of dollars in the future which will have the same effect as pissing into a southerly on the Wellington waterfront. The plastic bag ban is nothing more than virtue signaling and will contribute nothing.

What's the point? I think we need to tone down the rhetoric on climate change and focus on meaningful things we can do to make nz cleaner and greener that dont break the bank.

Humans arent going to be around for ever. If climate change doesnt kill us it'll be a meteor, war, disease etc....let's just enjoy the ride as long as we can.

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#2189853 2-Mar-2019 14:38

Standby for incoming.....
You just dropped a hand grenade into the echo chamber.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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#2189868 2-Mar-2019 15:49

How so? Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Even a dumb one.

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#2190016 2-Mar-2019 19:37

MileHighKiwi:

The Greens want us to be carbon neutral by 2030 or something but to do that would mean killing off the entire NZ cattle herd, banning all non electric vehicles, closing down most manufacturing etc. It would plunge many New Zealanders into poverty and joblessness.

I must have missed that policy statement

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#2190065 2-Mar-2019 21:57

Rikkitic:
How so? Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Even a dumb one.

Asked and answered (and seconded by the look of things) in one line.

Take a step back and look at your post.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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#2190091 3-Mar-2019 00:08

Keep it on topic and within the FUG. Some of that back and forth is adding nothing.

Just sayin'. Buy price per watt capacity going down daily. Installations going up daily. If the graph has a weakness it doesn't show how fast the solar price continues to drop in the last few years due to the scale of earlier drops.

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#2190104 3-Mar-2019 07:55

Dingbatt: Standby for incoming.....
You just dropped a hand grenade into the echo chamber.

Haha, no doubt...

Would love to hear some statistical evidence to counter my suspicision that we're pissing into the wind while countries like India and China triple their energy demands and build hundreds of coal plants.

I lapped up Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth when it came out but these days I dont really care. I do what I can and respect the environment but with global population growth they way it is our actions are insignificant in little old NZ.

Just saw a cool video on YouTube of Elon Musks commercial flights in 2018....160,000 miles traveled, hundreds of flights.

Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw spent the most of any government minister on international travel in the last quarter of 2018. I guess it takes a lot of flights to save the planet!

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#2190111 3-Mar-2019 09:05

MileHighKiwi: Would love to hear some statistical evidence to counter my suspicision that we're pissing into the wind while countries like India and China triple their energy demands and build hundreds of coal plants.

Rikkitic

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#2190135 3-Mar-2019 09:37

As the alternatives improve (see above), the excuses for doing nothing become ever lamer. Pointing to the air travel of others is particularly childish. Musk may well be a self-centred jerk who flies in a private plane, but Shaw is merely one passenger on a commercial airliner. He may be a hypocrite, but if you are going to accuse him of that you need to include the reasons for every flight he has made, the benefits, if any, that resulted from those flights that could not have been obtained from teleconferencing, and travel alternatives that could have been used in place of the flights. Otherwise you are just making cheap shots that don't mean anything.

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