Originally Posted by CaptUSA
BRB gonna go buy me a 70K truck... dang gum inflation - stupid corporations tryin' to rob us all the time! :lol:
French recycling plant on fire housing 900 tonnes of lithium batteries
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...es/ar-BB1itX1u
PARIS (Reuters) - Some 900 tonnes of lithium batteries were on fire at a battery recycling plant in southern France, authorities said on Sunday, sending a cloud of thick black smoke into the sky above the site.
The fire broke out on Saturday in a warehouse owned by French recycling group SNAM in Viviez, north of Toulouse, local councillor Pascal Mazet said in a statement on X.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ItqymyM3Pe4
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
And to the point of this thread... Here's a tasty little insight into what's coming.
Will America ever stop building more highways?
https://news.yahoo.com/america-ever-...80932096.html#
Stepping stones, indeed.For decades, the United States has built and expanded a 220,000-mile network of state and interstate highways, easing cross-country travel while dividing cities and boosting suburban sprawl.
But as the planet warms, some activists are fighting back - citing the future emissions of adding lanes and the devastation faced by communities razed to make way for them. Their push against giant multilane highways represents an emerging frontier for the environmental movement, which has historically been more focused on fossil fuel projects than seven-lane roads.
“We don’t often think of it in those terms, but expanding highways is essentially like building new oil pipelines,” said Ben Crowther, the policy director for America Walks. “It increases emissions in the same way.”
Last week, a coalition of almost 200 groups called for a nationwide moratorium on expanding highways - citing their environmental harm and the forced relocation of nearby low-income communities of color. A new national group called the Freeway Fighters is uniting local ones under one umbrella, helping activists learn from each other on how to slow expansion - from an almost $10 billion project to widen Interstate 45 around downtown Houston to a plan to enlarge Interstate 5 around Portland, Ore.
It might seem to be an improbable fight for a country long known for its “love affair” with the car. But with the United States aiming to cut emissions to zero by 2050 - and less than 1 percent of cars on the road electric - activists say America’s main transportation system has to change.
Historically, much of America’s public money spent on transportation has gone to highways. In 2017, $177 billion in public money went to highways, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than double the $75 billion spent on mass transit and rail infrastructure. Even now, with many of the nation’s highways in disrepair, about 20 to 30 percent of all public highway spending goes to expansion, rather than programs to fix and repair existing roads.
State and local transportation officials say highway expansions can help relieve traffic jams, improve road safety and boost economic development. If planned correctly, they also argue that such projects can boost bus movement and ride-sharing.
Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said in a statement that each state transportation department “uses a wide variety of strategies to advance safety, mobility, and access across the state and in every community.”
But experts argue that expansion projects do little to reduce traffic congestion - and add to the country’s climate problems. Almost 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from transportation - most of it from cars and trucks. While interstate highways make up only around 1 percent of the nation’s roads, they carry around a quarter of its traffic.
“We continue to spend significant amounts of money at the federal level and at the state level expanding our highway networks,” said Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. “Given the climate issues that we are already facing - and the fact that we are already building out a massive highway network around the country - I think it’s legitimate to ask whether that’s the right set of priorities.”
One of the arguments against such expansions is the theory that adding more lanes just leads to more traffic - what economists call “induced demand.” Sitting in traffic on a highway during rush hour may seem like an advertisement for expanding the highway - after all, more lanes allow a greater flow of traffic. Under that logic, traffic operates a bit like water through a pipe: The larger the pipe, the more water can get through.
But economists and traffic engineers say that’s not a good analogy. When lanes are added to a highway - or any road, for that matter - more cars arrive to fill the available space. People might decide to drive more, or the expansion might further develop an area and encourage people to move in.
“Induced demand is just what happens when you increase supply,” said Matthew Turner, a professor of economics at Brown University. In 2009, Turner and his colleague Gilles Duranton published a paper showing that vehicle miles traveled in U.S. cities increased “in exact proportion” to highways. The result has since been replicated in Japan, China and many countries around the world, including in Europe. “It looks like this is a fact about the world,” Turner said.
Turner says that this doesn’t mean building a highway is always the wrong choice - but that building a highway to reduce congestion is not effective. “If you are trying to build to reduce road congestion, you should stop,” he said. “If you are trying to add road congestion to facilitate people moving around, that’s a whole different thing.”
But anti-highway activists say this link between bigger roads and more highway traffic - combined with the heavy pollution burden on communities - should take expansions off the table.
Some environmentalists also say they feel betrayed that the Biden administration is not spending all of the approximately $350 billion in highway funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on repairing existing highways.
According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, more than 20 percent of the funding, which is spread out over five years, so far has gone to expanding or widening roads. An additional 6 percent has funded new construction. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, 17 of the 20 largest highway projects supported by the infrastructure law include expansions.
“This money could have been used to change the status quo,” Crowther of America Walks said. “Instead, we’ve seen a doubling down on new highway projects.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration has taken the strongest actions of any Administration in history to reduce carbon pollution in transportation,” Samantha Keitt, a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration, said in an email. She pointed to funding in the infrastructure law for electric buses, EV charging stations, and bicycle and pedestrian projects.
President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included money to tear down highways that divided communities. But that program only has $1 billion in dedicated funds - a tiny sliver of the tens of billions of dollars going to expanding existing highways.
The Biden administration has encouraged the adoption of electric cars as a path to meeting climate goals. But it will be difficult to deploy EVs fast enough to completely remove emissions from transportation. According to one study in the journal Nature Climate Change, 90 percent of vehicles would need to be electric by 2050 to meet climate goals. And even if EV adoption accelerates dramatically, many gas-powered cars will still be on the road by mid-century.
Beyond the climate impact, activists argue that highways displace communities of color and expose neighborhoods to deadly air pollution. According to one analysis of data from the National Air Toxics Assessment, the risk of respiratory illness is 3.4 times higher for people living less than one mile from a highway than for those living more than 10 miles away.
“We’re thinking about air quality and what it does to people’s bodies,” said Ally Smither, a singer and an organizer for Stop TxDOT I-45, a group opposing the Houston highway expansion.
Coalitions resisting highway expansions can include a range of different groups - community efforts, environmental groups and other civic organizations. In the push to stop the widening of I-45, neighborhood groups are joined by public health advocates, bike organizations and the local chapter of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
Kendra London, a Houston activist and the founder of Our Afrikan Family, learned about the expansion project four years ago. Since then, she has hosted community meetings and scheduled bike tours to show the houses and residents who will be displaced if the project, which is estimated to demolish over 1,000 homes, goes through. “We’re left out of too many vital conversations,” London said.
Activists have rallied hundreds of highway opponents at public meetings and protested outside of state transportation offices. Other groups file civil rights lawsuits or complaints under the National Environmental Policy Act, which triggers stringent reviews for many major projects.
“Turn out as many people as you possibly can and put up a show of force,” Crowther said.
Some states are challenging the status quo outright. The Colorado Department of Transportation has set strict emissions targets in response to a 2019 law. The new rules require the state to analyze how highway expansions would increase emissions - including induced demand - and offset those increases with transit, bike or pedestrian projects elsewhere.
Matt Frommer, a senior transportation associate at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said the rules had helped block an expansion of Interstate 25 after the state realized that the project would exceed new pollution limits.
The state plans to spend some of the hundreds of millions of dollars saved on bus and transit projects.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
Wasn't this already debunked? I think it was even this thread....
A coal plant that has been running for 50 years will run a while longer to make sure this new battery plant has enough power. Will be replaced by gas turbines.
This is the real world where you can't just click your heels together and conjure up a battery factory.
Nope.
That's what the image i posted and you quoted says. Did you really think I was implying that a new coal-fired plant would be built?
Can't just click your heels together and turn all this EV nonsense green, either. It all exists within an existing infrastructure, and the fact that this new infrastructure is being built in an area that can't keep it running "sustainably" just points up all the hypocrisy involved.
If the stated goals were the real goals, they'd actually be trying to achieve the stated goals, not making excuses, and plans to burn a different fuel which also contains carbon.
Last edited by acptulsa; 02-20-2024 at 12:35 PM.
See? That's the most important part of this... If the market isn't self-sustaining, it's not "sustainable". The only way EV's are even a topic is because there are powerful interests that are stealing our wealth in order to offset all the financial losses. Government uses taxes and debt to prop up the industry. Institutional investors use the central-bank printed money. And the losses are STILL piling up!
Those losses manifest in financial losses, energy efficiency losses, environmental losses, and time losses. It's a complete misallocation of OUR resources! And idiots like Gomer fall for it all.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
lol the EV market is literally crumbling and clowns are still running in to buttress it... some people must have some big dollars invested, methinks...
It's a religion to these people. They bought the myth that EV's were going to save the planet and it makes them feel better about themselves. They don't care who they hurt in their pursuit of salvation.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
Yep. And all the while the "Climate Change" narrative is literally crumbling all around them. It's absurd that they're holding to it at this point, especially given the research that is emerging regarding historic temperatures and CO2 levels, as well as the effects that CO2 levels are having on overall greening of the planet.
This is a self-made mania, and if left uncontrolled, it will lead to the collapse of human civilization well before any atmospheric changes ever would!
Rivian is slashing 10% of staff
Electric carmaker Rivian said on Wednesday that it will be cutting 10% of its salaried workforce as it deals with slowing EV demand.
The company made the announcement in its 2023 fourth quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
The Q4 financial report also revealed that despite making and delivering twice as many EVs in 2023 as in 2022, the company still saw a $5.4 billion loss for the year.
And for 2024, Rivian expects to produce around the same number of vehicles — about 57,000 — as it did in 2023. That's much lower than the 80,000 vehicles that analysts forecasted the company would be producing in 2024, according to Bloomberg.
...
This is the company's third round of layoffs in the last year and a half — it cut 6% of its staff in February 2023 and another 6% in July 2022, Business Insider previously reported.
"Rivian, like other automakers, is facing the music of economic uncertainty, consumers' waning enchantment with EVs, and strict federal tax credit rules," Insider Intelligence senior analyst Jacob Bourne said.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post to the internet can and will be used to humiliate you.
Your position is that we should just keep drilling for oil?
First of all... There is no substitute for oil. Period. What the EV advocates are pushing for is oil PLUS all the battery materials.
Secondly, I push for any economical option as long as those who want it pay for it. Allow the market to decide. I have battery-powered tools that I use in my garage, but I bought them - I didn't have to steal from my neighbors with the foolish notion that I can feel better about myself because I care about the environment.
Your position is a joke. You took other people's money and want more of it. And you're trying to justify it to ease your guilt. Seriously, take an inward look and you'll see how pathetic that is.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
There's no substitute for oil for SOME things. Transportation fuel is one of those things that can be replaced and done so with greater efficiency and less pollution (which does not matter to me at all BTW).
The earth receives 1300 watts per square meter and the sun is pretty reliable. Solar panel's EROI is 7-10, depending on what methodology you use for the analysis. In simple terms, invest 1 barrel of oil manufacturing PV panels and get back 7-10. Did you know that the EROI on the shale fields is only about 5:1? Did you also know that those fields are close to being played out? Where will the next wells be drilled?
Current PV panels are around 18% efficient. Newer perovskite-based PV panels start at 26% efficiency. The EROI numbers are likely to improve over time.
You have battery power tools, great so do I. Did you know that the cost of batteries used in those tools has dropped 90% in the last ten years? Why? Because the electric vehicle industry has massively scaled production. Yup, you are also sucking on the EV tit! Welcome aboard.
I would wager the taxes I have paid in my lifetime are 10X what you have paid. I have zero guilt about taking my $7500 EV tax credit (three times) from people too stupid to use it themselves.
First of all... There is no substitute for oil. Period. What the EV advocates are pushing for is oil PLUS all the battery materials.
Secondly, I push for any economical option as long as those who want it pay for it. Allow the market to decide. I have battery-powered tools that I use in my garage, but I bought them - I didn't have to steal from my neighbors with the foolish notion that I can feel better about myself because I care about the environment.
Your position is a joke. You took other people's money and want more of it. And you're trying to justify it to ease your guilt. Seriously, take an inward look and you'll see how pathetic that is.
Do you seriously believe that there is an alternative? Do you have any idea how much of the modern world is built upon the access to gas and oil, and their byproducts? It seems that you don't just by the mere fact that you would even ask this question. I will whole-heartedly answer it - YES! YES! A thousand times YES! We should absolutely keep drilling for oil, and natural gas. Petroleum byproducts have exponentially improved human life in incalculable ways, and natural gas is only second to nuclear where it comes to "clean" energy (but of course we can't use nuclear because of... reasons, I guess?)
I'd be more than happy to take you out to a well pad where drilling and then fracking is taking place and let you actually see how sustainable and clean the process actually is.
And there you have it...
Forget all the other BS that you said in your post that has been refuted multiple time in this thread... You like wealth transfer from the lower incomes to the higher incomes. Another elitist $#@!. Why are you at RPF?
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
NO!
The government has stolen hundreds of thousands in taxes from me....I'm clawing some of it back. I've still paid for more illegal wars, and people too lazy to get out and work than most people.
Nice try evading my point about PV panels.
You could teach a master class in rationalization. You are literally stealing the wealth of our children and grandchildren for your toys, but whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
And I didn't evade the PV stuff... it's been hashed and rehashed so many times in this thread. But I'm aware that you're using that to hide your unconscious shame.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
We've spend 100 years building a society that runs on oil. Oil will likely be used for another 100 years. Keep drilling; in fact, if we don't, society will collapse.
All I'm saying is that we should use oil wisely. If you can achieve a 9:1 EROI using solar panels, then we need to explore that option. If we can use some of that oil to build fission reactors, then we should explore that as well. If you care about nuclear waste then build thorium reactors....no problem. I'm saying leverage oil into something that makes more energy rather than waste it.
Do you really think its ok to waste 75% of every gallon of gasoline produced? That's pissing away $2.25 every 30ish miles!
If you spent $3000 on a 3kw solar array you could power your car for 36 miles every day for 12-20 years. The government can't stop the sun, you are not subject to the whims of extremists who were funded by the CIA using YOUR tax dollars. A few thousand bucks and some DIY skills can buy you freedom of movement for 20 years!
Last edited by GomerPile; 02-22-2024 at 01:28 PM.
You cant refute what you don't understand.....the world needs ditch diggers to run conduit for my solar farm...you're safe.
You realize I was an expert in energy policy specializing in electrification up until last year?? If you weren't so lazy, you could go back through the thread and see my credentials. Pretty sure I understand. I'm no ditch digger - I just won't rationalize the damage being done to them by people like you.
"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
You were not very good at it from what I can tell. I'm an EE, lived off grid for years, and help others do the same.
In fact, today there is a guy in VT who owns a very old Nissan Leaf who has not spent a single dollar fueling his car in over 4 years. We built his system from a pallet of PV panels removed from service, some surplus prismatic LifePo4 cells, and an inverter....cost a few thousand bucks and some beer. When the power goes out, which is often, he still has power. Of course, he owns a generator, but it hasn't been used in so long that it won't start.
Solar and battery prices are cheaper today. The electronics to make it all work are half the price with twice the features.
You realize I was an expert in energy policy specializing in electrification up until last year?? If you weren't so lazy, you could go back through the thread and see my credentials. Pretty sure I understand. I'm no ditch digger - I just won't rationalize the damage being done to them by people like you.
I'm in favor of finding alternative sources of energy. That said, solar and wind - the 2 principle alternative power sources - are at this point notoriously unreliable, particularly when it comes to the ability to store the energy produced in batteries. Nevertheless, I'm definitely in favor of humanity finding other ways to produce energy.
But energy isn't even half the battle when it comes to oil and natural gas, and that seems to be what no one who protests against the use of those natural resources seems to understand. For example, these "Just Stop Oil" children who go around gluing themselves to pieces of roadway wouldn't be able to have the glue, nor the bloody asphalt, if it weren't for petroleum! They'd have to be smashing their hands under cobblestones otherwise. It seems they have no idea what the modern world has given them.
This fevered effort to stop using oil and natural gas byproducts is an absurdity, and one that thankfully won't any time soon actually be implemented by the powers that be.
Does he do any driving? He obviously doesn't commute to a day job, because there's not enough daylight left after five to charge more than a cell phone, this time of year.
I thought you were the expert? You should know that the minimum peak sunlight is 3 hours in VT...and yes, you can harvest a lot of power in the winter. The more calendar days away from the minimum, the more energy you can harvest.
He's a retired veteran who drives about 8 miles a day (to and from breakfast). Once or twice a week, he makes a market run and medical appointments. The battery in his Leaf is in bad shape, fully charged, it might deliver 50-60 miles of range (he did not pay very much for it).
The panels he bought were 10 year old units rated at 220 watts. When we set them up, they were producing about 150 watts each. They came with micro-inverters that were not working well on the reduced output. We tried pairing a single inverter with two panels. This was plenty enough power for a level 1 charger. The original system did not have a battery buffer, so the charger had to deal with fluctuating power (problematic). He eventually acquired an OEM charger from a salvage yard. The Leaf OEM charger is very well designed and handles poor-quality power nicely. On a good day (Sept/Oct) it was possible to harvest ~4kwh of power (10-15 miles of driving).
We redesigned the system about three years ago to use an Inverter/charger and 5kwh of prismatic Lifepo4 cells (recycled cells). The MPPT charger harvests a lot more power than the old micro-inverters for some reason. We reconfigured the panels into ~120v strings, which likely helped the MPPT charger do its thing.
We added a BMS with two relay outputs set to trip at roughly 2 and 3 kwh remaining in the pack (he tweaks this constantly because he has nothing better to do). The system turns the car charger off at the 2kwh level and back on at 3 (~1kwh hysteresis). The idea is to retain a small buffer to operate things in the house while dumping most of the power into the car. There is a bypass switch that you hit on rainy days so all the power is put into the battery bank.
The average person drives 30 miles per day. With better equipment, it would be very easy to handle that use case with PV panels. Even if you had to collect power during the day and dump it into the car at night, the batteries are pretty cheap....they even mount in 19-inch server racks.
You're the one pretending to be an expert. You're a dilettante. Oh, I can get a retiree to breakfast. Real commuters are SOL. Uber drivers will soon have to own five cars to work one full shift. But you don't care what hardships this regulatory insanity causes people, as long as they aren't you.
Just another sociopath. How boring.
That's simply untrue.
The sad fact of the battery situation, that nobody on the "pro" side will ever face, is that if someone cracks the battery problem, electric cars are going to be the absolute last place they go.
The first place they're going to go is into cargo ships, factories, office parks, and other big-money commercial applications that are centralized and where someone is going to save real money by making the shift immediately. Once there is power smoothing for solar, the rooftops of all the large square footage commercial buildings in the US are going to get paved over with panels, because there will be an actually feasible way to use solar at that point.
The next place they're going to go is going to be high-end laptops and cellphones so people working oil rigs in the middle of nowhere can carry around less stuff. After that will come all the consumer electronics because there's simply more money on the table meeting people's need to have a laptop carry a charge longer than 2 hours than there is a market demand for electric cars.
After all that there might be a market for making a viable long-haul electric truck, where there is already a lot of parking and waiting involved in their use.
And you can tell this because this is exactly what has happened with battery improvements. They went into smaller scale applications like consumer electronics first before someone stacked tons of them into EVs. You have this exactly backward.
And you can tell the battery tech is still not viable for EVs because we haven't paved over the roofs of all the crappy concrete block buildings in the country with PV's yet. When that happens, that will be your signal that EVs are finally viable.
And even then there will be holdouts because a significant number of us understand that at least 60% of the features of the current EVs for sale are features that we not only don't want, but we actively refuse to have in a car we own. I'm totally game to own an EV - but if look under the hood and I don't see a steering column, we're not going any farther in the discussion. If I can't trace an unbroken hydraulic line from the brake pedal to the cylinder to the lines to each individual caliper, we're done. We're not even getting as far as the NSA tracking and the remote kill switches and the self-driving if it comes without a direct connection between the controls and the wheels.
I have zero guilt about taking my $7500 EV tax credit (three times) from people too stupid to use it themselves.
Great. I have zero guilt about taking medicaid for my daughter. Take all the tax credits. If you don't take them it keeps this crap solvent longer.
The question is, what kind of guilt are you going to feel when a fundamental safety flaw in your EV kills a teenager? You can't be unaware of them.
If it happens to someone in my family, I'm not going to consider how many taxes you've paid in my calculation of whether to use the state to go after your ass. Because neither the state nor the EV manufacturer is going to be there for you, and they're not going to leave me a choice.
Last edited by fisharmor; 02-23-2024 at 12:10 PM.
There are no crimes against people.
There are only crimes against the state.
And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.
its not? Please explain.
This data about battery cost falling 90% is easy to locate (EDIT this link would show 80%+):
https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-...ow-of-139-kwh/
Pepsi is already using electric trucks BTW:
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-semi...on-less-event/
Last edited by GomerPile; 02-23-2024 at 02:43 PM.
I'm sorry if you didn't track this - but the bold & enlarged part is what is factually untrue, as I have already demonstrated.
We all bought cordless drills before Tesla was even founded, and we all upgraded to Lithium Ion models before they got any charging stations installed. Teslas had their first battery fire long after Samsung did.
We are absolutely not sucking on the EV tit. EV demand may be helping to reduce production costs that were already plummeting but your statement that we're benefiting from EVs being in the market is at best stretching the truth.
There are no crimes against people.
There are only crimes against the state.
And the state will never, ever choose to hold accountable its agents, because a thing can not commit a crime against itself.
The Mainstream News Media doesn't even want to discus the costs of replacing an EV battery.
Which is another red flag.
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