Their customers won't want to hear that they have to pay much higher prices to keep dirty, noisy diesels on the road because doing otherwise isn't properly Southern. As was pointed out on Telsarati its not like diesel will get cheaper, it will likely get more expensive. Just as silly is the claims that diesel will some how get better technologically- you'd have to go to scams like Nikola Hydrogen* or Writespeed*- these firms aren't fooling anyone. Either way fluctuation in the cost of diesel is another risky variable of financial uncertainty that electric doesn't suffer from. Maybe OD thinks it can hide behind traditional red state welfare with more pork to cover the difference but seems like that is apt to get out in this high profile environment. Public's going to be finding out how much welfare its already put out to cover petrol- this will come up in the context of recovering the externality costs for damage already done- shock will be for the costs just to keep this stuff afloat let alone covering the damage its done. If OD had said we're worried about our drivers and their families that would be one thing. But they didn't. If its worried about its families and drivers I think it should go open collaborative, get rid of the ownership and let it be based on membership and fund everything as they go- get rid of all the conflicts of interest and do something innovative and agile. But if your name is some sort of reference to the Antebellum South (OD) then I think tradition comes first including loyalty to petrol. Petrol is Civil Rights Part II. Same people who didn't understand they didn't have a right to exploit other human beings and turn them into Cadillacs, surprise, surprise have trouble understanding they have no right to profit from poisoning other people's air, food and water and that other people don't want to let them take centuries to figure it out. *These two firms are like someone saying 10 years after we've gone to digital download with Neflix and Amazon Prime etc that they plan to introduce CRT TVs with built in VHS players- makes that much sense.
Here in the UK, carbon dioxide emissions have risen due to people buying less efficient petrol cars. Whether this worries you is up to you, but I think its a pity diesels have suddenly become untouchable. With properly maintained particulate filters and NOx suppression, they are a lot cleaner than petrol engines. Sadly, the government tests are so poor that it is possible to pass even if these anti-pollution measures have been completely removed! Some people do this as it improves mileage slightly! I own a petrol and a diesel car, and prefer the diesel. It has plenty of torque, cruises comfortably at 70 or 80, is quiet, and economical to run. I generally use it for longer journeys, using the petrol one for local short journeys. What is needed is stricter monitoring of diesel cars and their emissions, provided you believe carbon reduction is important. Going back to petrol seems to be a retrograde step. EVs, here, are pretty well irrelevant. They make little or no difference to emissions, being stuck at about 0.5% of sales.
That is nonsense. Nothing is stuck with regard to EV's you've never had anything but compliance junk by your shill petrol makers. Tesla is the exception. The idea that Diesel is cleaner hardly seem's apt. You're nose can tell the particulates are much higher. Clean diesel seems about as obviously nonsense as clean coal. Diesel engine mechanics are less complicated that's about it but it has clearly always been a less refined fuel traditionally has burned black and dirty. Early gas engines never had that kind of black crap associated with them, diesel is like gas with raw crude still left in it. Quite possibly cheaper because less refining is involved. But its irrelevant because it will be gone soon.
You cannot argue that diesel engines are more efficient than petrol ones and emit less CO2 per mile. Particulate filters work well, but are often not maintained or illegally removed entirely. I'm not particularly keen on petrol or diesel as a fuel, and the smell of both when burnt is equally unpleasant but I think the condemnation of diesel has been greatly overdone. You may be interested to learn that in the UK both are heavily taxed, and not so long ago supermarkets found they were running out of cooking oil. It turned out that this was (being untaxed) a fraction of the cost of diesel and it had been found that diesel cars ran well on it. The tax inspectors were easily able to detect the difference from the smell, and prosecuted those found using it. I am not sure if corn oil is 'clean diesel' or not. It is, however, carbon neutral in that the carbon it contains is recycled atmospheric carbon. At the present rate of adoption of EVs in the UK - hardly changing from half of one percent of new cars, it would appear that ICE cars are likely to stay with us for rather longer than you seem to imagine. Unfortunately, the dire economic effects of our stupid decision to leave the EU means that old polluting cars are likely to remain on the road far longer than they might otherwise have done.
Martin, I think you're going to have a Corbyn revolution. Note how Corbyn treated Saudi Arabia, just straight up cut the UK's use of their product over human rights!!!! I think that's quite a premonition for what will happen with petrol cars in the US. In the US I suspect Trump will go down harder than Kennedy did and affect the right equally, its a bottoming out and we will recover ground and then some even on things like net neutrality or money as privileged speech- down with the money mega phone.
This is getting into politics, but a Corbyn led government would suit me in many ways. I've lived through nationally owned gas, electricity, water and rail and more recently through their private ownership, and national ownership was MUCH MUCH better and cheaper. If he renationalises them I think almost everyone would rejoice! We are fed up with being ripped off by big corporations who invest almost nothing to improve their service. As to electrical energy we are steadily growing the amount of renewable power from wind and solar. As I write, wind is supplying the UK with 23% of its electricity demand. Interestingly, our electricity consumption is falling, year on year, as more and more people go over to solar roofs, LED lighting, and other more efficient ways of using electricity. If you go into a store that sells domestic 'white goods' such as cookers, dishwashers and fridges, vacuum cleaners, they all prominently display the amount of energy they will consume over a year, and people seem keener to minimising this than the capital cost of the item! I don't think we have really started to consider the energy consumption of transport very seriously yet, apart from more efficient cars being produced. This is having an effect in that more and more filling stations are closing down, but there is precious little interest in electric vehicles outside of London where you can avoid all sorts of restrictions like congestion charges etc. I suspect that whether hydrogen or battery cars prevail will depend on what happens in Europe. Looking at the map of hydrogen stations, worldwide, ( https://www.netinform.net/H2/H2Stations/H2Stations.aspx ) there seem to be more in the EU than in the USA, and they are spread more evenly. Also, more are planned, so I think this may be the way we go here. Our housing stock certainly doesn't favour home charging, and that is most unlikely to change. I cannot see people forced to refuel at filling stations taking kindly to spending much longer than they do now charging their cars. But we shall see what we shall see.
No, hydrogen cannot prevail, its radically less efficient from an physical and economic standpoint than even petrol with is a complete sub threshold loser. Hydrogen prevailing would literally entail people working even longer unnecessary hours than they already do and we work way more than 2x what we prior to language and tools (outside the nest that is) in this tech age where the tech should be preventing that. Plus hydrogen is a travesty environmentally and worse yet it would just be a petrol pocket stream going into the pockets of people like the queen, an even worse travesty when world is trying to depose that type of abusive power. Even using solar to break the water on site is simply much worse than just using PV and batteries. Its true your homes may be stacked a bit in some areas like projects meaning roof top solar will be a bit more limited but nothing prevents rewiring. And really it would (but an estimate provided by a Fuji solar engineer years ago) less than 13% of US roof tops to replace all forms of energy in the US- would it take much more than than in the cloudy UK with today's more efficient cells? The stats you site for the UK are beyond wonderful, the UK is an example of how always welfare based never ever actually profitable in its history and generally more than totally underwater petrol will never be profitable even if it has never been profitable before. Factual numbers most would likely show that battery backed solar is already half the parity price almost every where in the world but it will go to 1/17000 of the parity price where petrol won't fall at all in its pure red imploding future- its too busy trying to hold pensions funds hostage because it knows its built out, mature and at scale and can't drop any more- good riddance.
Well, I couldn't follow much of what you seem to be trying to say. What I could understand I disagreed with - sorry! Put it down to 'English' English as opposed to 'American' English but I could make little sense of most of your post. In particular, I found "...even petrol with is a complete sub threshold loser." incomprehensible given that in your country it seems to supply the majority of cars on the road, with EVs making up one or two percent of sales! It may one day be abandoned, but calling it a 'loser' at the moment seems ridiculous. Nor do I understand why hydrogen would make us work any longer.
Don’t blame America for 101102s ramblings! We have no idea what he is talking about either. I think he might be a rouge AI bot that is speaking in some language completely incomprehensible to humans. https://nypost.com/2017/08/01/creepy-facebook-bots-talked-to-each-other-in-a-secret-language/
Well, it certainly is 'stream of consciousness' stuff and no mistake! I think he might well have valid points to make but its hard to pull them out and answer them sensibly.
Petrol per people like Rifken has economic efficiency of about 13% based on low intractable low physical efficiency of its entire apparatus- nothing can fix it. 13% seems like an almost arbitrary number until you see its context and begin to compare it to other energy sources and understand how the economic efficiency rating is derived. Hydrogen is just Trojan horse for the petrol scam, its about trying to preserve the money and power of the people behind the petrol travesty- its a pure scam. Under hydrogen the hydrogen will come from the dirty petrol industry with business as usual. But back to petrol as an economic loser, that low efficiency means its never been revenue positive, always a state welfare case in the purest most exaggerated sense. Its claimed profits are pure transfer payments. When petrol become enshrined with the petrol dollar that was because by that time it was realized it could be used to hollow out the public sector with ever increasing welfare demands and keep the public sector too weak to check the newly superfluous status of capital- it was figured out around 1970 that the economic problem "as Keynes" had termed it had been solved thereby making capital itself obsolete- always was if people are clear on the tax cycle but glaringly so at that point. The pressure on resources that the massive petrol inefficiency creates means people work more such that they might as well be digging ditches and filling them back up again. Rifken breaks it down in some of his books but its no secret. To intuitively to understand it imagine an Earth based economy built on mining stuff off Pluto, a very lean proposition. It was about creating artificial scarcity and managing deflation other stuff like that along with sucking up to check state resources. But bottom line in an environment where there is an alternative to this public sector hollowing out pusher style petrol based BS the nations that take advantage of the also radically higher efficiency of green energy alternative (compelling outright replacement) get a lower cost of goods and insurmountable strategic advantage. So yes petrol is a loser (greatest ever) and Romney was for instance as another Republican Petrocrat willing to risk WWIII for the useless petrol scam in Iran (Iran will trade EUs for petrol) with constant calls for war in Iran and at the same time was projecting when calling Tesla a loser. Yep petrol is a loser- the economic and politcal case against it is even stronger than the environmental case. Also no coincidence that GM put lead in the gas in 1925 like a precursor to cointel pro- any wonder there was a lead poisoning in the Flint's water to supposedly save money? Typical mindset of petrarchy- pure psychopathy. But you'll note that all these companies that try to tie heredity to mineral rights real estate claims tend to be pure scum- Monsanto, AG Farben, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, Standard Oil/Exxon...Massey Energy, Energy Transfer Partners. Koch Industries, PG&E, Enron, BP on and on.