I think they can be persuaded to embrace at least electric vehicles with the right messaging, because they have this ongoing bromance with Elon Musk. Musk definitely seems to drive liberals up the wall, and conservatives know this and they love it, so if Musk winds up as the main spokesman for electric vehicles, and actually spearheads a BIG push for mainstreaming electric cars and not just for the people who can afford Teslas, it could work.
One might envision a dark future where Teslas have a “coal rolling” factory option.
I’ve thought that a Republican president and Democratic Congress could secretly get a lot of stuff passed by using reverse-psychology logic.
The Republican would have to tout something like “TrumpCare” universal single-payer healthcare, while loudly bragging about how this would abolish the “inferior Obamacare” and provide the best healthcare in the world. “Liberals gonna hate this!” Then the liberals would have to put up a screeching pretense of hating TrumpCare, in order to get the Republicans onboard (if liberals hate it, it must be a good thing.) But then enough D’s would have to “reluctantly” cast their votes for TrumpCare to get it past both houses of Congress.
Same for increasing taxes on the rich. “Those rich liberals like Gates, Bezos, Soros, Obama, Kennedys, every Hollywood actor and actress, are going to lose their minds!” And the liberals would all have to get in on the act, shedding liters of crocodile tears in front of the media.
Rinse and repeat, and this charade could be used to get almost any agenda passed in politics and break gridlock. All it requires is liberals who can put up a convincing-enough screeching and wailing performance.
Conservatives think that the free market is intrinsically good, and since the free market has chosen fossil fuels, that must be the correct answer.
In the real world, we understand that the free market generally does a poor job at dealing with externalities, such as, say, CO2 pollution. They have to be hit-you-over-the-head obvious, such as the Cuyahoga River catching on fire, before conservatives will acknowledge that maybe some regulation of the free market is OK. And even then, many will claim that the free market would have solved the problem eventually.
The other problem, of course, is that the market is rarely free because our government serves corporate interests. Hence, zoning laws and lobbying against public transportation for decades have supported a car-centric culture that has made the “free market” anything but. The idea that we’ve all “chosen” to live in geographically diverse suburbs and drive Suburbans to and from our megaschools, megachurches, and megastores is an illusion, one the conservatives are more than happy to believe because it happens to line up with the wishes of corporate interests.
Once there’s money to be made in alternative fuels or alternative transportation methods, conservatives will come around. But by then liberals will be on to the next crisis and conservatives will be denying it.
A topic for another thread is why conservatives seem so hell bent on using up our (American) sources of a non-renewable resource. I could never figure out “drill baby drill” when it just meant that we’d all but guarantee that the last country with extractable petroleum reserves wouldn’t be us, and whoever it ends up being could charge us a literal fortune for it. But this whole thing just shows how badly conservatives would do at the marshmallow test, no matter the consequences.
Have you ever heard of the Ludicrous mode in a Tesla? 0-60 in under 3 seconds.
My response to the OP was how do you expect to coal roll a bicyclist of Prius if you are driving a hydrogen powered vehicle? You beat me to it!
Yup. I wonder if the minivan’s battery had enough juice to make it back to the starting line, and I wonder what shape the motor would be in after a few such races.
Isn’t the fact that conservatives believe absolute nonsense that the scientific community has refuted hundreds of times the actual point of this thread?
Minivan?
Even in non-Ludicrous mode, Tesla’s have no issue getting up to speed faster than most vehicles.
I think it just goes back to what @iiandyiiii said in post #2 - liberals want to limit petroleum exploration so conservatives are for expanding it, no matter the long-term consequences. It’s like conservatives have few ideas of their own, so they wait to see what the liberals are going with, so they can just take the opposing stance. There’s no more thought put into it than that.
Nitpicking, but the post you quoted gives the specific example of someone hauling freight through the mountains, something that electric trucks are pretty terrible at.
Is it cheaper? Ignoring the infrastructure cost, if it’s more expensive to run on a daily basis, you’re going to get a lot of blowback.
And, I do have another question - not snarky; this is a real question. How much of our fossil fuel consumption is motor vehicles? Would this cut 5% of oil usage? 10%? 50%? 80%? Considering at this time most of our electrical generation comes from oil or natural gas, how much true benefit would we see? Similar question for electric cars - if our electrical generation continues to be primarily from oil, are we being more efficient?
This has been a concern of mine as well. I believe posters here have provided reading that centralized electricity generation using fossil fuels is more efficient and less polluting than distributed internal combustion of petroleum. Someone smarter than me can probably provide the cites.
I believe that about half of the oil becomes gasoline and about half of that becomes fuel for vehicles. Some further amount is used for lubricants within the vehicles.
To be fair, fossil fuels have a lot more energy density than any current batteries, or any within the foreseeable horizon of development (mostly due to the fact that half of the chemical reaction comes from the near-inexhaustible supply of oxygen we have all around us). There are ways around that (making your car use less energy, or devoting more space in the car to energy storage, or just accepting lower range before topping off), but if you do those same things with a gasoline-powered vehicle, you gain in other ways. And those tricks are difficult; everything’s much easier with the abundant energy fossil fuels provide.
So, yeah, switching away from fossil fuels is difficult. But of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do it; we do. What it means is that we need to devote more resources to solving the problem.
I was commenting specifically on the “raw power” aspect. Electric motors do “raw power” pretty well.
Hydrogen is not a remotely practical fuel for widespread use in motor vehicles. Aside from the very low energy mass density of compressed hydrogen gas (and the virtual impossibility of using the cryogenic liquid hydrogen in ground transportation vehicles), gaseous hydrogen will leak through even the smallest gap and through most normal flexible sealing material, and exposure to hydrogen results in embrittlement in most commercially available steel and aluminum alloys. Of course, the majority of ‘blue’ hydrogen commercially available today comes from steam reforming of natural gas which is not remotely environmentally friendly and has about as large of an atmospheric footprint as just burning gasoline. Hydrogen is, of course, highly detonatable compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels and would require an entirely new infrastructure to transport, store, and distribute it as a commercial widely available transportation fuel. See Hydrogen Safety or AIAA-G-095A-2017 Guide To Safety of Hydrogen and Hydrogen Systems for more detail on the issues with handling and using hydrogen as a bulk fuel.
If we wanted to look at sustainable synthetic fuels for transportation use, methanol and dimethyl ether (DME) make far more sense in terms of the ease in which the existing fuel distribution infrastructure could be modified to carry them as well as their use in existing internal combustion engine designs with modest modification. It is clear that the future of a significant portion of ground transportation is going to be electrified but for applications where liquid fuels are desirable or necessary methanol and DME offer the best balance of energy density, cost, and adaptation to the existing distribution infrastructure.
Stranger
I think it’s as much chicken as egg there; most of the ones I’ve met are skeptical of the climate change science in the first place- they don’t believe it, they think scientists have a liberal axe to grind, whatever.
The more cynical ones don’t question the actual notion of climate change, but rather the severity and the consequences. They are skeptical that what climate scientists see is actually AGW, instead of some other unexplained phenomenon.
It’s all ignorant bullshit of course, but if you’re looking at the world through that sort of tinted glasses, alternatives to petroleum seem like less capable (in many ways) solutions that are looking for a problem.
The fundamental problem is that the science got politicized on behalf of the GOP and the fossil fuel industry- now it’s just accepted that if you’re part of the GOP, you’re agin’ global warming and think that gas, coal and petroleum are the best thing going, and that there’s fundamentally something suspect about alternatives, because that’s what the Democrats want. Even ones that are as innocuous and low-impact as wind power in the Texas Panhandle (which was blamed by the f**king Governor for the winter storm of 2021).
Oil companies tell Fox News what to say. Fox News tells its viewers what to think. If Fox changed its tune tomorrow, their audience would do the same, without a hint of self-awareness. It’s as simple as that.
This is pretty much what I came here to say. I see it’s already been said.
IOW, the thread title could be simplified to the question “Do conservatives think?” and the answer is that, for the most part, they don’t. If they did, they would understand that climate change is a major global threat with catastrophic consequences, and that continued GHG emissions at the present rate is unsustainable.
The other aspect of not thinking very much is that they see the intrinsic good of petroleum fuel as the fact that it powers the loud pickup trucks they have today, right now. They have no interest in fancy electric vehicles that are only driven by wimpy liberals, and are impossible to convert into super-loud coal rollers.