Banning the sale of new thermal cars, motorcycles, vespas does help with climate change in the long run
Friendly reminder that “thermal cars” and fossil-fuel cars aren’t necessarily the same thing. I have a car that runs on 100% biodiesel and is therefore carbon-neutral, for instance. Yes, it’s niche, but it does exist – and if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need.
In that scenario electric or hydrogen cars would probably be better for global food supplies. Especially in a world of increasing food scarcity due to climate change, having poor people starve while rich people turn food into fuel for their cars doesn’t seem fair. You can put solar panels or wind turbines on barren land and not take up valuable arable land.
It’d be better then releasing more carbon and further exasperating the problems, but I think there are better solutions.
I think their might be a naming issue here. I was going by the wikipedia article for biodiesel which says it’s made directly from crops and it’s
Unlike the vegetable and waste oils used to fuel converted diesel engines
Which seems like what your talking about. It doesn’t seem to point to a name for that though, maybe just biofuel. It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that:
the available supply is drastically less than the amount of petroleum-based fuel that is burned for transportation and home heating in the world, this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
And that about half of current U.S production is from virgin oil feedstock. 10% of all grain is already used for biofuel, and that’s just to cover the bit of ethanol used for petrol, if we transitioned even a fraction of cars to full biofuel that number would go up by a lot.
There’s also still an opportunity cost with even the waste oil. If we have the capacity to collect and refine waste oils into fuel, then we can probably also just recycle it and refine it back to food standards.
I should have been more clear: yes, biodiesel can come from things that compete with food crops, but the biodiesel made from waste is the only kind I endorse.
(Fun fact: the kind I use in my car is made from chicken fat, a byproduct of all the chicken processing plants we have here in northern Georgia.)
It’s also possible to make synthetic gasoline, by the way, and I’m only endorsing making it from CO2 produced as a byproduct of something else (and, pointedly, not coal gasification or steam reforming of natural gas).
It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that…
…this local solution could not scale to the current rate of consumption.
That’s where this part of my comment came in:
if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need
In Australia we have chip shops along the lonely roads through the desert. Some of them are so isolated there’s no mains electricity. Recently they became electric car accessible by attaching car charge stations to biodiesel generators. The waste oil from frying the chips powers the electric cars.
Friendly reminder that “thermal cars” and fossil-fuel cars aren’t necessarily the same thing. I have a car that runs on 100% biodiesel and is therefore carbon-neutral, for instance. Yes, it’s niche, but it does exist – and if we eliminated the need for the vast majority of cars by fixing our cities, then carbon-neutral ICE fuels might be able to meet a bigger fraction of the remaining need.
In that scenario electric or hydrogen cars would probably be better for global food supplies. Especially in a world of increasing food scarcity due to climate change, having poor people starve while rich people turn food into fuel for their cars doesn’t seem fair. You can put solar panels or wind turbines on barren land and not take up valuable arable land.
It’d be better then releasing more carbon and further exasperating the problems, but I think there are better solutions.
Nowhere in my comment did I say anything about using fuels that would compete with food crops. Biodiesel is a product usually made from waste.
I think their might be a naming issue here. I was going by the wikipedia article for biodiesel which says it’s made directly from crops and it’s
Which seems like what your talking about. It doesn’t seem to point to a name for that though, maybe just biofuel. It does say some biodiesel is made from waste oil but also that:
And that about half of current U.S production is from virgin oil feedstock. 10% of all grain is already used for biofuel, and that’s just to cover the bit of ethanol used for petrol, if we transitioned even a fraction of cars to full biofuel that number would go up by a lot.
There’s also still an opportunity cost with even the waste oil. If we have the capacity to collect and refine waste oils into fuel, then we can probably also just recycle it and refine it back to food standards.
I should have been more clear: yes, biodiesel can come from things that compete with food crops, but the biodiesel made from waste is the only kind I endorse.
(Fun fact: the kind I use in my car is made from chicken fat, a byproduct of all the chicken processing plants we have here in northern Georgia.)
It’s also possible to make synthetic gasoline, by the way, and I’m only endorsing making it from CO2 produced as a byproduct of something else (and, pointedly, not coal gasification or steam reforming of natural gas).
That’s where this part of my comment came in:
In Australia we have chip shops along the lonely roads through the desert. Some of them are so isolated there’s no mains electricity. Recently they became electric car accessible by attaching car charge stations to biodiesel generators. The waste oil from frying the chips powers the electric cars.