Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Are Electric Cars Worse for the Planet?

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Not content to upset the recyclers in the community (See: Is Recycling Bullshit), I’m moving on to electric cars today.  Rob at Say Anything Blog had an interesting post the other day citing a report from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that talks about how electric cars might be worse for the environment than their gas guzzling counterparts.

To summarize the report, electric cars seem to be more hazardous to the environment because a majority of the electricity that they consume is created in fossil fuel burning electric plants.  Rob points out that the study was done in China where a very large proportion of electricity is produced by coal powered plants, and that a smaller proportion is produced that way in the Unites States, but that the proportion still isn’t small enough to negate the negative effects of the increased pollution from production.

Wind farm and greenhouse gas farm, togetherI think this is another case where the technology just isn’t advanced enough to support the new initiatives.  Cleaner electricity production would, obviously, help the situation, but many of the clean energy production methods just aren’t mature enough to support themselves, let alone a growing fleet of electric cars.

Combine that information with the added expenses in maintenance of an electric car, and they begin to look downright unattractive.  Not to mention that they have yet to create an electric car that is capable of reproducing the power that is needed for them to become mainstream in smaller cities and rural areas.

What do you think?  Are electric cars an already dying breed?  Should we continue to support them in hopes that electricity production technology catches up eventually?

photo credit: kevin dooley

Turning Plastic into Oil

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Typically, we hear about how much oil we use and turn into plastics.  When you think about it, it does make some sense that you could then turn plastics back into oil.  And you can! Watch this:

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind after watching that is, “Why can’t they do that on a much larger scale, and eliminate a huge portion of our plastic waste?” And, here’s your answer. They can. In fact, here’s an article from 2009 about just such a plant. It’s called the Envion Oil Generator, and the company was getting ready to roll the plants out nationwide at the time. I haven’t heard anything about them since then.

Mr. Fusion
It’s an intriguing idea, really. Take the plastics that we create, and then waste, and turn them back into usable oil. It would probably put a fractional dent in our oil use, but any little bit is better than none, and would help make the oil supply last longer. Of course, there’s the downside that emissions would continue that much longer too, but, frankly, I don’t see the dwindling oil supply as anything more than a epic disaster, so the longer we can offset that, the better. According to that article, the plant can create oil from plastics for about $10 a gallon(oops. Where’s my proofreaders?) Barrel. You’d think the profit margin there would be well worth building a plant or two.

What do you think? Is it a smart thing to do? Useless?

photo credit: the extinction blues