It's time to aim low

After Poland talks, a new reality starts to set in, says McKibben; 350 ppm must be the goal 22

Bill McKibben

I spent the last few nights of the recent Poznan climate conference sleeping in the By the Way youth hostel, an excellent accommodation filled with excellent young people who had done excellent work at the negotiations.  After the final day of deliberations, many of these young people visited the doubtless excellent discotheques of Poznan, returning home beginning about 4 a.m. in various states of excited giddiness. This allowed those of us (well, the one of us) of a more elderly persuasion an excellent opportunity to lie awake, thinking over the events of the days just past. And what I kept thinking about was the old model of the universe, which held that the Earth was at the center.

This so-called “Ptolemaic Universe” seemed obvious—since our planet clearly stood still, and since the other planets rotated around it daily, it was pretty darned clear that we were the stationary middle. It’s true that attempts to map the slightly odd orbits of those planets—which at various points would “retrograde,” or turn backward—cast some doubt, but not enough to really shake anyone’s faith. The Greek astronomers invented all sorts of flourishes to make the orbital calculations work: deferents and epicycles, equants and eccentrics, little wheels within wheels that preserved the theory for a very long time, more than a thousand years—till finally Copernicus came along with some new data and blew the whole thing up.

In somewhat the same way, we’ve all agreed to suspend disbelief for a long time and keep pretending that the process to do something about global warming is working. The text of the developing treaty is stupendously complicated, with a thousand fixes to plug various leaks: how you count where the carbon will come from, and who will pay what to whom, and what about those forests, anyway? The debate is staggeringly dull, and incredibly hard to follow.  Every once in a while, some expert or another will emerge to say that the European Union has backslid on its intermediate targets, or that the global financing facility needs to be reconstituted, or so on.

But the real problem with the whole process is that, for some time now, it has been out of phase with the science of global warming. It’s impossible to take the most recent science, and the real world that it describes, and square it with the model being put together at these endless Conferences of the Parties (last week was the 14th, and the rainy, raw, dreary Polish weather matched the mood). The most obvious way to state this would be: The Arctic has now melted, 50 years ahead of the schedule that scientists had predicted when these talks were in their infancy. What does that tell you?

The language of these negotiations is numbers, and so the less obvious but more pragmatically powerful way to state it is: These interminable talks are designed to build a machine that would halt the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 parts per million. They’re so loaded with loopholes, and the timetables are so slow, that they probably wouldn’t accomplish even that, but that’s the goal. The theory is that the world we need is a 450 world, based on the science from five and 10 and 15 years ago.

But a year ago, our leading scientific authority on climate change, NASA’s James Hansen, said that was wrong. All the data that he and his team assembled suggested that 350 parts per million was the maximum possible if we wished to keep “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, and to which life on earth is adapted.” They pointed to not just the Arctic melt, but the shocking thaw of sub-tropical glaciers, the shifting of monsoonal rain patterns, and the rapidly developing fear that Greenland and the West Antarctic could raise sea levels much more quickly than we’d previously imagined. They said—in the context of these talks—that the sun does not in fact revolve around the Earth.

If such a view grows to be accepted, the implications are enormous. We would have to move much more quickly—we’re already at 387 parts per million, i.e., too high—and we’d have to cut much more deeply. Hansen’s calculations show that you’d need to be done burning coal by 2030, and much sooner in the developed world, if you were going to keep enough carbon out of the atmosphere to allow the chance for forests and oceans to cycle CO2 out and someday return us to 350. In essence, a 350 world would demand emergency action.

Since change comes slowly, work on the treaty has continued little affected for the last year. But the new data was beginning to sink in. (I should note my own interest here—I’ve spent the last year helping to run 350.org, a global campaign designed to spread this news far and wide.) Early in these Polish talks, the Lesser Developed Countries and the small island nations started talking a lot about “survivability.” They’d begun to figure out that following the negotiating script meant they’d soon be hauling their flags down from in front of the U.N. because their nations would have disappeared beneath rising seas or spreading deserts. This “survivability,” they said, corresponded with “350.”

And then, on the last day of the talks, Al Gore gave his speech, which drew everyone into the main conference hall. It was a good talk, but by far the longest and loudest applause came when he formally announced the new reality. “Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate,” he said, adding that we “need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million.” People erupted—probably not the Chinese and American delegations, and definitely not the Saudis and the Russians, but all the people who’d spent the last few years struggling with the idea that their work was getting increasingly off-the-point. It was a way of saying: We’ve been engaged in saving the treaty, not saving the world—and we’d rather save the world.

Given the momentum of the talks, they will drag on—nations have February deadlines for submitting responses to drafts, and new meetings in March and June, and everything points toward Copenhagen next December, where a final pact is supposed to be signed. But it’s hard to see now how that’s going to happen. Both Hansen, the leading scientific authority on climate change, and Gore, the leading political voice, have endorsed the idea of 350 as the only rational target. They’ve said the world circles the sun. Now we have to proceed on that understanding. It won’t be easy—“political reality” says it’s impossible. But political reality is easier to change than scientific reality. Since we can’t change the laws of physics, we’re going to have to try and change the laws of man.

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Bill McKibben Reader. He serves on Grist’s board of directors and is cofounder of 350.org.

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  1. 314159265 Posted 10:38 pm
    14 Dec 2008

    wrrr...

    ... and then most politicians and economists still have problems with the idea that Earth is round hence finite (not infinite hence flat).

    (Waiting for jabailo to scream...)

    Mars J. Pictor Florifulgurator, Western Bavarian Forest.

  2. Whiskerfish Posted 1:27 am
    15 Dec 2008

    just to sharpen the debate

    how about looking at the most important video clip of the year?

    http://tinyurl.com/6lp2ru

    Whiskerfish (wondering why y'all haven't noticed this yet)

  3. amazingdrx Posted 3:13 am
    15 Dec 2008

    "tinyurl" problematic

    Check out the wiki article warning on tinyurl.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyURL  

    It's fraught with hackery and spam.  Better to use the original link.

    But peak oil by 2020?  Where's the big headline?  I'm not getting the importance of peak oil, it's peak GHG that matters.

    Reduce oil demand incremetally year after year by say 4% per year and peak oil will never come.  It will be left in the ground in a few decades, much like whale oil, once a staple of the US economy, is now left in the whales.

    If we don't reduce oil use by this figure, climate change is a way worse threat than peak oil.  Not to mention economic collapse.  Brought on this time by manipulated trading pushed by "peak oilers" serving their oily supporters in hedge fund play money derivative land.

    Yhe peaksters were/are wrong headed in the importance they place in this whole concept.  

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

  4. Gar Lipow's avatar

    Gar Lipow Posted 3:27 am
    15 Dec 2008

    tinurl - no problem with trusted source

    Basically tinyurl is only a problem if used to hide where a malware or bogus link points to. So if Whiskerfish or someone I trust is the poster, no worries.

  5. Whiskerfish Posted 3:29 am
    15 Dec 2008

    amazing

    the importance of the story is manyfold.

    It explains the lunacy of the lack of planning of most govts. It sharpens the debate around re-tooling of transport infrastructure for the general public. I can't help thinking that it means that we're screwed -- the pressure to develop tar sands and oil-from-coal will be massive.

    Most of all it puts the IEA in a corner like I've never seen them be put there outside of irrelevant, wonky discussion groups (look at the popularity of this video on guardian.co.uk) etc., puts a face on an organisation that many people have taken for granted, and exposes the fragility of their work.

    Have you ever had this stuff laid out for you so clearly? I don't think so. Has the general public ever had it laid out like this, 'from the horse's mouth'? I don't think so. How many mainstream media reports have you seen that trumpet the IEA's new, revised, conventional-oil depletion rates? They're too busy writing about flying shoes.

    Whiskerfish

  6. Whiskerfish Posted 3:33 am
    15 Dec 2008

    and, amazing

    no-one is saying that climate change is not a bigger problem. Monbiot is just smart enough to approach the issue from a number of angles. By demonstrating that the energy-gods like the IEA are

    a) often mistaken

    and that

    b) their positions are moving closer to what enviros have been saying all along

    well, I don't need to explain the importance of that to you, do I?

    Have a look at his interview with Yvo de Boer, also on the Guardian site.

    Whiskerfish

  7. Billhook Posted 6:22 am
    15 Dec 2008

    Moreover, Amazing . . .

    with respect, I think you may be overlooking the impacts of oil supply peaking.

    The possibility of a treaty-led 4% /yr cut in global oil usage in the next few years seems very remote, given the passion for mobility and also the far greater TsGHG / MWH of coal-fired power - (Not interchangeable of course, but you see the point).

    The IEA projection is of a massive depletion rate IF there is huge (unprecedented) investment in oil E&D,
    yet we are instead seeing the global E&D budgets being hacked by the day.
    Without that scale of investment, the IEA projects a pretty catastrophic rate of oil supply decline.

    As a long time climate campaigner, I don't question climate's supreme relevance.
    Yet the economic impact of PO, with oil supplies getting so tight as to spike prices so as to crash any nascent recovery from this Depression,
    I see as a critical hindrance to organizing the finance and logistics for the requisite global industrial reform.

    We in the EU & US are in danger, just the same as people in India & China, of knowing fairly well what is needed to end fossil fuel dependence and recover airborne carbon,
    but also of lacking the wealth to bring it about as PO both guts our economies
    and further empowers the filthy oil substitutes, which cannot of course ever be scaled to resolve the PO destitution problem.

    Regards,

    Billhook

  8. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 6:55 am
    15 Dec 2008

    Billhook --

    Let me suggest the idea that the productive capacity of the developed world (plus China/India) does not depend on the health of the financial sector -- at least, not in an engineering sense, that is, the factories are all still there and the engineers know what they know.

    However, the oil problem is a transportation problem, since the world has been stupid enough to put over 95% of transportation in a completely dependent state.  In fact, I was amazed to find out that Europe is even more dependent on trucks for freight than the US -- although that might be because the US uses almost half of its rail freight for coal...for instance, 350.org is not particularly interested in trains...

    However, you're only as strong as your weakest link, and transportation is currently the weak link.  But with automobile capacity way beyond what it needs to be at this point (there's a good story at economicpopulist.org a bit of the way in, about what other countries are doing to preserve their automobile industries), it seems to me a rational plan of action, which is doable, would be to go on a train-building spree.  But I'm afraid most of the planet has their heads in ...er...the sand, and doesn't want to believe that trains are a better bet than cars.

  9. Colin Wright Posted 7:07 am
    15 Dec 2008

    Well said, Billhook...

    We can expect the oscillations in oil price to magnify in the years ahead. That is, the next spike may be over $5/gall of gas, perhaps even the Last Oil Shock, who knows?

    I was out visiting on the (fairly remote) Olympic Peninsula over the weekend, and maybe it was the snow in the forecast or something, but it felt very vulnerable over there. Sure, the rich will be able to afford their plug-in hybrids, but a new car is just out of the question for the working poor, who rely on old beaters. That means that all these remote commmunities will be at risk for economic collapse -- there will be no one to do the manual work that economies need (cooks, waitresses, cashiers, etc.).

    And as Billhook points out, functioning, healthy economies will be crucial to be able to finance the transition to low-carbon societies.

  10. witsendnj Posted 9:12 am
    15 Dec 2008

    tree senescence

    Recently I have written to various environmental groups and so far found, to my surprise, that even those whose mission is to preserve the environment are strangely oblivious to some immediate and recognizable effects of climate change and pollution.  Perhaps that is because there are so many impacts, such as coral reef bleaching and melting glaciers, that compete for scientific study and press attention.  However I think the wholesale demise of trees on the East coast should be of particular interest, since the consequences are likely to directly impact even elected officials who make US policy.  Not even the most privileged among us will be immune from the transformation to a treeless landscape.

    As a non-scientist but observant naturalist, I believe we are on the brink of total ecological collapse - at least here where I live, in western NJ - and the states around here I have had occasion to visit recently, PA, NY, CT and RI.

    I can find virtually no one who is interested in the fact that ALL the trees in this area are in decline.  At the current pace, within 2 to 5 years, there won't be a tree left alive.  In this part of the Eastern Seaboard, it's pretty obvious to me that the death of trees, whether coniferous or deciduous, old or young, is ubiquitous and crosses all boundaries to include every species.  In hindsight, since I have lived in the same wooded area for 30 years, I can see where this decline began at least a decade ago.  Until this year I attributed it to individual blights, and optimistically planted hundreds of trees on my farm.

    These past few months however, it has became gradually and painfully clear to me that the decline is accelerating at a truly astonishing pace.  I can see lichens smothering tree trunks, spreading by the day.  Many pine trees are already utterly bare of needles and those that aren't are yellowing, thinning and covered with cones in a defiant attempt to reproduce.

    What is causing this alarming decline?  It cannot be any one disease, pest, or fungus, because every single variety of tree is visibly suffering.  Having thought about this since last July, when leaves uniformly became shriveled, scorched or brown, I have come to the conclusion that the prolonged drought, and particularly the lack of snow cover in winter which should blanket and saturate the ground with water, must be responsible.

    Of course, air pollution doesn't help either, and there are opportunistic parasites and invasive species.  But the underlying cause for such a universal impact upon trees ranging in age from 2 to 300 years must be global warming - which has led to a severe, long-term attendant dryness.  The NJ state DEP seems to prefer willful ignorance of this phenomenon and refuses to consider any drought indicators other than reservoir levels.

    In spite of, or perhaps because of, the inevitable consequences to accepting this premise, few seem willing to even ponder the staggering dimensions of a complete loss of trees.  Wildfires, loss of habitat for all dependent critters and plant species (including the destruction of stream life dependent on shaded banks), downed power lines with extended outages, crushed homes and commercial buildings and blocked roads - it seems no one will take notice until these events come to pass here on the east coast, as they have already been more obvious in the West (although still not often linked to global warming).

    In the news just the past few days about the ice storm in New England, not one report I heard seems to have considered the idea that the trees are collapsing so badly because they are already weakened due to climate change.  Here in NJ, even without an ice storm, trees are toppling.  As a mushroom collector for over 30 years, I am sorry to report that the morels I have found in the same reliable spot were completely absent the last two seasons.  Another telling indicator is that here, in a very rural locale, rivers, hills, homes and other structures that were until this year shrouded by the woods, even in winter, are now plainly visible.

    Also implicit is that the loss of trees will lead to feedback loops, making the climate ever hotter and even drier.  I fear that golf courses and long showers will be unattainable luxuries and we will be fortunate to have a cup of water with which to brush our teeth.  For my children, I dread the conflicts that will accompany scarce basic resources.

    In attempting to communicate my concerns with various environmental groups I have frequently found that even they are in denial.  I suppose from their point of view, their own jobs are at stake - who would contribute funding to a conservation society whose mandate is to plants trees, if they admit we are in for desertification and the trees cannot thrive?  Nurserymen who you would expect to be aware also stand to lose their livelihood should they advise their customers not to waste money investing in planting trees - and even foresters won't have much of a future if there are no forests to study.

    Nevertheless it dismays me that so few people will even acknowledge what is, quite frankly, obvious to anyone who bothers to actually see the evidence in plain view.  I wrote to two local newspapers about the issue - they didn't even run them as letters to the editor.  I believe if the scientific facts were made available (presuming they exist - I have found it difficult to find very recent studies of forest health, especially in language accessible to non-experts), the general citizenry would be far more receptive to fundamental change in politics as usual.

    If there is any hope of averting a complete loss of biodiversity, and ultimately human civilization as we have had the privilege to know it, we really must stop kidding ourselves about the consequences of inaction.  It's too bad that it looks like people will not pay attention to this until literally, a tree falls on their house...if then.

    I am hopeful that someone who has the appropriate credentials will make a serious, objective study of the trees in their current condition, and use the information (or at least, make it available) in an attempt to reach the public and inspire a real effort to stop this tragedy in the making.  It's not that I think this particular aspect of climate change is by any means the worst the world will face.  Islands inundated by seawater are surely more terminal.

    But I do think perhaps it might be an aspect that will bring the issue alive for the US electorate in a way that a more remote disaster will not.  Pretending that we have until 2050, as Thomas Friedman suggests, to fiddle around with emissions, is nothing but self-delusion.

    So many have claimed they didn't see the economic collapse on the horizon.  There is a far more devastating collapse in our future.  For me, it is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.  I can't avert my eyes...and it is fast transforming into a fast-action train wreck.

  11. WWAGD?!'s avatar

    WWAGD?! Posted 2:49 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Easy Go, Easy Come


    http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/ar ...

    The record melting of Arctic sea ice observed this summer and fall led to record-low levels of ice in both September and October, but a record-setting pace of re-freezing in November, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

    "This is the essence of science...you ask an impertinent question and you're on your way to a pertinent answer." -- Fox Mulder, S1E4, "Conduit"

  12. tlabadie Posted 4:33 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    The Scientific Reality...

    So the real questions are, what is it that makes people move so slowly on problems involving environmental collapse; what makes them settle for less-than-effective solutions; why are people so self-deceptive?

    Obviously the decades spent trying to reason people out of their torpor have not worked, indeed cannot work.

    Once we know the answers (and we had better find them soon) then we can find an effective motivation and save not just the environment, but also Humanity.

    - The truth always sounds like what you already believe.

  13. Pangolin's avatar

    Pangolin Posted 5:47 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Denial rules the day

    If the IEA projections about oil decline pan out cars are dead tech. Passenger jet travel is dead tech. Chemical agriculture with sprays of herbicides and pesticides is a dead tech. Whole chunks of the economy that have relied up till now upon the cheap shipment of non-essential goods hundreds or thousands of miles are going to face customers who are hoarding their money in the face of economic uncertainty. The worlds major oil fields are in decline and the economic engine to finance new drilling is as dead as a capsized rig.

    Governments, state and local at least, are now faced with the handicaps of rising expenses in the form of indigent or underemployed populations and declining tax bases. Those governments who prudently set aside funds in Wall Street investments for pensions and planned capital expenditures are finding shredded paper where endowments used to be. They can't keep the streets paved in the good neighborhoods and county roads are being abandoned.

    With transit demand up and revenues down light rail projects are going to be hard to fund. How do you tell your business sector that you are going to spend a year destroying the road in front of their storefront in order to move infrastructure so the rail can go down? Where is the money supposed to come from anyway? Nobody, but nobody, is willing to go on record as advocating raising taxes on the only group that has any economic flexibility left, the top 5% of income earners.

    The transit options left are existing heavy rail, bus transit, neighborhood electric vehicles, bicycles and personal rapid transit (PRT). Of these only personal rapid transit systems are new to most people and would require a white knight to fund a demonstration project. PRT systems have two advantages in that they could largely overshoot existing road networks with minimal disturbance and that they could deliver palletized freight to stations as well as persons.

    A palletized freight system, a physical internet, could deliver a pallet to your small business from the local railhead or from the freight dock that serves the truck farms five miles out of town. Eliminating the need for a truck and a driver to accompany every load could mean that small producers could ship directly into town as dairymen did with milk, butter and eggs in the early days of light rail systems. A "milk run" was literally that in 1910 and was done on an electric trolly. Today that trolly couldn't get to the supermarket but a PRT pod could.

    Every option will demand money or resources. I don't see any way where we get to continue using three ton SUV's and quad-cap pickups as personal transportation for family errands. Endless fleets of delivery trucks could be hybridized but the roads are falling apart. We are going to change. If we're careful we get to retain a functional economy that resembles what we were used to. Otherwise we're stuck with the nightmares of the doomers.

    Put the Carbon Back

  14. Whiskerfish Posted 9:41 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Pangolin

    you said

    "If the IEA projections about oil decline pan out cars are dead tech. Passenger jet travel is dead tech. Chemical agriculture with sprays of herbicides and pesticides is a dead tech. Whole chunks of the economy that have relied up till now upon the cheap shipment of non-essential goods hundreds or thousands of miles are going to face customers who are hoarding their money in the face of economic uncertainty. The worlds major oil fields are in decline and the economic engine to finance new drilling is as dead as a capsized rig."

    this is why this vid clip is so important. You must remember that the declines they're talking about are in conventionsl oil -- there's still quite a bit of tar-sand and coal that can be made into oil.

    My concern is that with the looming threat of so much infrastructure becoming 'dead tech', govts will turn to tar-sand and coal to provide liquid petroleum. That would be a climate disaster, as in Game Over.

    Whiskerfish

  15. Pangolin's avatar

    Pangolin Posted 10:27 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Whiskerfish

    We're at game over now. Temperatures on the Siberian and Canadian shields are already warm enough that methane emissions from those areas have gone up several fold. Just this month it was announced that methane emissions in winter months continue far above that accounted for in any models.

    If we shut off the oil and gas tap now and close off all coal burning the planet will continue to warm. The pretense that we are going to be able to maintain agricultural production and exploit the tar sands and coal-to-liquids projects doesn't hold up. These projects already cause so much environmental damage that it's getting increasingly difficult to maintain social and economic integrity.

    The very complexity of these kinds of fuel recovery projects means that they are subject to cascade effects from far outside their direct operating environment. They're pretty much doomed to failure.

    The same social disruption that confounds the big energy companies encourages purchase of solar panels. A few panels on your roof is as close to a guarantee of some power as you can get. Some power is lots better than no power in an outage.

    People are getting the idea that the oil ages days are numbered. They just want good options for alternative ways of making do.

    Put the Carbon Back

  16. amazingdrx Posted 11:40 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Chinese plugin hybrid $22k

    A few percent conversion to these cars per year, plus efficiency in the form of more mass transit, car pooling, biking, and regular economy cars replacing gas guzzling SUVs, would get the oil demand reduction to avert peak oil.

    Likewise conversion to renewable smart grid power and conservation would get the year over year reduction in fossil fuel use necessary to avert run away GHG climate change.

    This is also the only way to revive the global economy.  

    Focusing exclusively on peak oil obscures this reality.  It tends to leave the impression that liquid fuel substitutes for oil based fuel can solve global economic problems.  While disregarding the GHG climate tipping point.

    The underlying economic problems from reliance on monopolized energy commodities, like coal, gas, and oil, can only be solved with a green job/manufacturing revolution.  Just like WW II war production ended the great depression, this is our only way out.

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

  17. amazingdrx Posted 11:50 pm
    15 Dec 2008

    Check out this jeep

    http://www.autoblog.com/2008/01/14/detroit-2008-jeep-rene ...

    It's vastly over powered, as the hotrodders in detroit typically build, but wouldn't lower power version of this vehicle make sense as a plugin hybrid substitute for the military's hummer?

    There's a plugin hybrid contract ready to be written.  Why give chrysler money without getting something back?  Green jeeps.  Start the oil demand reduction with government ordered vehicles.

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

  18. Jon Rynn's avatar

    Jon Rynn Posted 1:23 am
    16 Dec 2008

    Peak oil and freight

    Whiskerfish, I wrote about the problem you bring up a while back: even though peak oil should be good for the environment because it will mean less carbon emissions from oil, it could also lead to more emissions if things like shale oil are exploited.  Ironically, the plunge in oil prices is putting a lot of those "dirty", and always very expensive, projects on hold (I don't know about tar sands).  Fortunately the new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is anti-shale.

    Pangolin, I'm curious about those trolley freight systems.  I'm wondering why those trolley systems worked, and my guess is that the cities offered a density that made them work.  I've thought that, even in a carless city, you would still need vans and small trucks for freight and also for servicing.

  19. amazingdrx Posted 1:37 am
    16 Dec 2008

    City BEVs

    "...in a carless city, you would still need vans and small trucks for freight and also for servicing."

    Yes! A perfect niche for pure BEVs Jon.

    Due to the compressed nature of cities, with shorter, slower trips, with plenty of opportunity for recharge or battery exchange.  

    I like these 5 hp electric "jeepneys" (mentioned on "Ecopolis") as trolleys, very low power vehicles like this don't need trolley power lines, they are fine on batteries.

    Plugin hybrids are more of a rural/suburban necessity.  They don't just stop after the batteries go dead, the backup power plant provides.

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

  20. Pangolin's avatar

    Pangolin Posted 1:09 pm
    16 Dec 2008

    Resonant induction charging too

    The perfect app for resonant inductive power transmission is small BEV's that make frequent stops in urban areas. These small vehicles could simply park in designated spots and ping the charging station built into the space. Charging would be automatic.

    A resonant induction field could then charge the vehicle without interacting greatly with the rest of the environment. The vehicle parked over the charging plate would keep pedestrians out of the magnetic field.

    The loss of power from non-contact charging could more than be made up for by more frequent charging opportunities, even stop lights, and lower battery weight. It also prevents the cord yank and cable wear problems that traditional charging stations would face.

    Put the Carbon Back

  21. Bob Wallace Posted 1:42 pm
    16 Dec 2008

    Or we could install "robot chargers"...

    There are some gas pumps that can recognize individual car types and automatically open the gas cap, insert the nozzle, pump the gas, close the cap.  

    If we standardized charge points on electric cars it would be easy to design an arm that reached out from a "parking meter", plugged in the car, and retracted.  Build in a no-start feature until the charger is out of the way.

    No loss.  No radio reception via your fillings.

    One could have the same sort of device in their garage.  Just drive in....

  22. amazingdrx Posted 3:06 pm
    16 Dec 2008

    Or

    Induction charge strips under the roadway.  Recharge as you drive.

    http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

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