Kudos to the Indonesians. They’ve figured a way to turn palm oil into biodiesel. Shame on the Indonesians. They’ve decided to turn rainforests into neat plantations for palm oil production.
To plant palms, Indonesians knock down endemic plants, that is, clear forests. They destroy ecologies of endangered species in the supposition that to do so will “save the planet.” Of course, there’s a niche market in the “save the planet from global warming” business. That might be the driver of biodiesel, rather than some altruistic love of the planet exuding from the hearts of Indonesians. And as in everything humans do, there are unintended consequences in growing palms. But, hey, a large proportion of people believe “we need to do something,” like using biodiesel and driving electric cars, maybe even self-driving vehicles controlled by AI. But are the things we are doing actually doing anything to “save the planet”?
Ana Meijide and colleagues studied the relationship between palm-oil diesel production and GHG (greenhouse gas emissions). They discovered a difference in the carbon emissions between younger and older palm-oil plantations, but drew this conclusion: “Both traditional and enhanced LCA (life-cycle-analysis) point to no GHG emissions savings compared with fossil fuel” (4).* Their study makes me think of the consequences of other “green” ventures, such as the plan by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection to ban gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Forget the biodiesel. Livin’ in Joursey? You’ll be drivin’ electric. Get your home charging station in place now. I mean, what could a new 240 volt entrance line cost when it’s properly installed by a licensed electrician under the regulations set by Joursey? California has a similar plan for electric driving.
I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” And the memory of that novel makes me ask whether or not the computers of zero-emission self-driving cars dream when they are recharging. And in that dream do electric cars war with biodiesel vehicles for dominance on the highways?
Want electric cars on the highways? Sure, why not? But they have to acquire their electricity from some source. If not from fossils, from what? Solar panels? So, you’re ready to drive your electric vehicle on a long trip. You’ll have to stop along the way to recharge. Figure some extra travel time. And while you wait for the recharge that might take as much as 40 minutes, which might, depending on your car’s tech, take you only 100 more miles, you’ll probably want to snack at the recharging station and look out over an unbroken layer of solar panels overlying once productive farmland. Will you ponder that it might take as many as twelve of those solar panels to generate enough energy for that small recharge? Let’s say we go all electric and replace those gas-guzzling-carbon-emitters; that’s a minimum of 100 million electric cars in need of recharging, not to mention all the trucks. If at any one time along the Interstate, a line of EV drivers queues up, they will see a field of solar panels that stretches as far as the eye can see and that might not be working well because it is, unfortunately, a cloudy day. A dozen panels for every recharge! And all those solar panels connected to their own storage batteries for nighttime recharging. Imagine the arable land covered by solar panels in, say, Indiana along I-80 or in Virginia along I-95. Good for drivers crossing Nevada, of course. Nothing on either side of I-80 for most of the east-west route except sunshine (not at night, obviously).
Imagine the EV recharging dream as a nightmare. In it, the Artificial Intelligence that is the car’s computer wanders through a world of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite, all encased in a thick plastic, the pollutants of the future making up a large part of the vehicle. The nightmare then flashes pixels of miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the poor are subject to exploitive labor practices just so that the world can get 60% of its cobalt.
Sure, tech will progress and EVs will become easier to recharge. And battery materials will probably transition from lithium-ion to lithium-titanate or lithium-iron-phosphate. The current high costs per kWh will decrease, also. They will carry drivers farther on a charge and charge faster. But like everything we do, EVs will come with an environmental cost, just as biodiesel comes with a cost. Two costs, in fact, one financial and one environmental.
Unintended consequences, also. Imagine a powerful electric car accelerating from 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds—driven by a teenager. Somewhere down the road of time there will be an outcry about 1,000-HP Hummers on the streets of suburbia. And all those electric vehicles in New Jersey (sorry, New Joursey) and other states like California will require recharging with home stations that might cost hundreds of dollars to install because of electrical compliance standards imposed by the state. And where will the energy come from? Not coal, obviously. Not oil. Maybe, a little natural gas if it’s not banned. Windmills, you think. Hydroelectric power? Tidal power (not in Oklahoma)? Or those solar panels, twelve to a car with a hundred million cars on the roads? What are we going to do, by the way, with all that palm oil? Make more Nutella? More margarine? Does that mean eating more glycidyl fatty acid esters as we turn from making biodiesel to making more palm oil for birthday cakes? How will we replace all those cleared rainforest habitats that we cleared when we thought planting palms for their oil was better for the planet because we could make biodiesel from it?
Will the EV’s computer have another nightmare? Who’s going to pick up thousands of birds killed when they tried to pass through a forest of windmills? Who’s going to remove the electric car pollutants from our waterways? Who’s going to recycle worn out solar panels?
Now, let’s not get all doom and gloomy. Maybe Tesla and the other big companies will invent EVs that run on lightning. Certainly, all the electric car manufacturers have already lowered the costs of batteries per kWh. Yet, green technologies have their recognizable downside in the composition of those batteries and other vehicle materials that will eventually end up in landfills or waterways.
And then there’s the cost of shipping raw materials from mine to manufacturer. I don’t think the Democratic Republic of the Congo has an electric car plant. That cobalt and other mined battery materials travel by ships that spew pollutants into sea and air. And there’s a GHG cost of bunker fuel, the sludge-like stuff used in cargo ships.
But if the AI that runs cars is like the intelligence of those who want to buy them, more heart than mind will prevail. Nightmares will be followed by pleasant dreams of electric sheep, the animals frolicking and jumping in fields of solar panels stretching as far as the eye can see, or at least to the nearest windy hill where windmills kill birds.
Meijide, Ana, et al., Measured greenhouse gas budgets challenge emission savings from palm-oil biodiesel. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14852-6.pdf Accessed October 25, 2020.
To plant palms, Indonesians knock down endemic plants, that is, clear forests. They destroy ecologies of endangered species in the supposition that to do so will “save the planet.” Of course, there’s a niche market in the “save the planet from global warming” business. That might be the driver of biodiesel, rather than some altruistic love of the planet exuding from the hearts of Indonesians. And as in everything humans do, there are unintended consequences in growing palms. But, hey, a large proportion of people believe “we need to do something,” like using biodiesel and driving electric cars, maybe even self-driving vehicles controlled by AI. But are the things we are doing actually doing anything to “save the planet”?
Ana Meijide and colleagues studied the relationship between palm-oil diesel production and GHG (greenhouse gas emissions). They discovered a difference in the carbon emissions between younger and older palm-oil plantations, but drew this conclusion: “Both traditional and enhanced LCA (life-cycle-analysis) point to no GHG emissions savings compared with fossil fuel” (4).* Their study makes me think of the consequences of other “green” ventures, such as the plan by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection to ban gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Forget the biodiesel. Livin’ in Joursey? You’ll be drivin’ electric. Get your home charging station in place now. I mean, what could a new 240 volt entrance line cost when it’s properly installed by a licensed electrician under the regulations set by Joursey? California has a similar plan for electric driving.
I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” And the memory of that novel makes me ask whether or not the computers of zero-emission self-driving cars dream when they are recharging. And in that dream do electric cars war with biodiesel vehicles for dominance on the highways?
Want electric cars on the highways? Sure, why not? But they have to acquire their electricity from some source. If not from fossils, from what? Solar panels? So, you’re ready to drive your electric vehicle on a long trip. You’ll have to stop along the way to recharge. Figure some extra travel time. And while you wait for the recharge that might take as much as 40 minutes, which might, depending on your car’s tech, take you only 100 more miles, you’ll probably want to snack at the recharging station and look out over an unbroken layer of solar panels overlying once productive farmland. Will you ponder that it might take as many as twelve of those solar panels to generate enough energy for that small recharge? Let’s say we go all electric and replace those gas-guzzling-carbon-emitters; that’s a minimum of 100 million electric cars in need of recharging, not to mention all the trucks. If at any one time along the Interstate, a line of EV drivers queues up, they will see a field of solar panels that stretches as far as the eye can see and that might not be working well because it is, unfortunately, a cloudy day. A dozen panels for every recharge! And all those solar panels connected to their own storage batteries for nighttime recharging. Imagine the arable land covered by solar panels in, say, Indiana along I-80 or in Virginia along I-95. Good for drivers crossing Nevada, of course. Nothing on either side of I-80 for most of the east-west route except sunshine (not at night, obviously).
Imagine the EV recharging dream as a nightmare. In it, the Artificial Intelligence that is the car’s computer wanders through a world of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and graphite, all encased in a thick plastic, the pollutants of the future making up a large part of the vehicle. The nightmare then flashes pixels of miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the poor are subject to exploitive labor practices just so that the world can get 60% of its cobalt.
Sure, tech will progress and EVs will become easier to recharge. And battery materials will probably transition from lithium-ion to lithium-titanate or lithium-iron-phosphate. The current high costs per kWh will decrease, also. They will carry drivers farther on a charge and charge faster. But like everything we do, EVs will come with an environmental cost, just as biodiesel comes with a cost. Two costs, in fact, one financial and one environmental.
Unintended consequences, also. Imagine a powerful electric car accelerating from 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds—driven by a teenager. Somewhere down the road of time there will be an outcry about 1,000-HP Hummers on the streets of suburbia. And all those electric vehicles in New Jersey (sorry, New Joursey) and other states like California will require recharging with home stations that might cost hundreds of dollars to install because of electrical compliance standards imposed by the state. And where will the energy come from? Not coal, obviously. Not oil. Maybe, a little natural gas if it’s not banned. Windmills, you think. Hydroelectric power? Tidal power (not in Oklahoma)? Or those solar panels, twelve to a car with a hundred million cars on the roads? What are we going to do, by the way, with all that palm oil? Make more Nutella? More margarine? Does that mean eating more glycidyl fatty acid esters as we turn from making biodiesel to making more palm oil for birthday cakes? How will we replace all those cleared rainforest habitats that we cleared when we thought planting palms for their oil was better for the planet because we could make biodiesel from it?
Will the EV’s computer have another nightmare? Who’s going to pick up thousands of birds killed when they tried to pass through a forest of windmills? Who’s going to remove the electric car pollutants from our waterways? Who’s going to recycle worn out solar panels?
Now, let’s not get all doom and gloomy. Maybe Tesla and the other big companies will invent EVs that run on lightning. Certainly, all the electric car manufacturers have already lowered the costs of batteries per kWh. Yet, green technologies have their recognizable downside in the composition of those batteries and other vehicle materials that will eventually end up in landfills or waterways.
And then there’s the cost of shipping raw materials from mine to manufacturer. I don’t think the Democratic Republic of the Congo has an electric car plant. That cobalt and other mined battery materials travel by ships that spew pollutants into sea and air. And there’s a GHG cost of bunker fuel, the sludge-like stuff used in cargo ships.
But if the AI that runs cars is like the intelligence of those who want to buy them, more heart than mind will prevail. Nightmares will be followed by pleasant dreams of electric sheep, the animals frolicking and jumping in fields of solar panels stretching as far as the eye can see, or at least to the nearest windy hill where windmills kill birds.
Meijide, Ana, et al., Measured greenhouse gas budgets challenge emission savings from palm-oil biodiesel. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14852-6.pdf Accessed October 25, 2020.
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