RT's on Electric Cars, Peak Oil and Deconsumptionism

Well, I have been a busy bee the last week, even if I haven't posted here. I got myself interested in electric car technology (and there are a lot of ideas out there), then found myself wandering around a website called Peak Oil. There are a lot of new and interesting ideas to be found in all these areas so let's try and take them one at a time.

Starting with deconsumptionism -- which is really something of what Living The Carfree Life is all about. I surrendered my car and found a way to make my life work reasonably well without it. I saved money, saved the environment, improved my health and improved my mental outlook. Given the number of human being currently on the planet (> 6 billion) and the likelihood that there will be even more (upwards of 10 billion) in the next generation, it seems certain that as a world society, we are just not going to make it unless we start practicing deconsumptionism. Mass conspicuous consumption is just not going to cut it anymore.

Peak oil is a theory that somewhere back in 2005 or 2006 there came a time when the most oil that was every going to be pumped out of the earth has been pumped out of the earth and that from here on in, production is falling and will continue to fall, perhaps exponentially. Some peak oil theorists go even further and predict that a catastrophic reduction in the human population will necessarily occur -- together with attendant wars and such. I am not sure that I believe that this will happen, but clearly the pressure is on to find an alternative to oil for purposes of transportation. The problem is, that no currently available technology stores as much energy in as little space as hydrocarbon burning technology -- making transportation alternative energy a particularly thorny problem.

All of this came out of my investigation of the possibilities of an all electric car. Tesla Motors has a very interesting and high performance model that will allegedly be available for delivery in 2008, but the electric car concept still suffers from significant limitiations of range (less than 250 miles in the case of the high tech Tesla's Li-Ion battery pack and less than 50 miles in the case of almost all other all electric vehicles) and speed (less than 25 mph in most cases). Until the all electric car can show a range of at least 120 miles and a top speed of at least 50 (preferably 75) mph, it won't be palatable for even primarily city driving. (I plan to do a later entry on the differences between city and open road driving and the advantages of electric vs. internal combustion technology for each.)

Clearly there is a lot of information to sort out and a lot of decisions must be made. For now, I am happy to be personally Carfree, and my interest in all these alternative technologies is from a purely business, profit motivated perspective.