Money a form of energy. Energy a form of time. Time costs money. Money can buy time. Electricity & thermal chemical energy from combustion power most systems in the world today. The urgent need to decarbonize driven by the 8 billion humans alive at the same time scale of mankind footprint on nature. We externalize pollution via exhaust emissions generated by combustion the foul the air with toxic pollutions while making climate change worse faster.
Making energy generates wealth by empowering production & transport of goods & energizing services of all kinds. With crude oil or petroleum, the net energy return on investment decline from 90 to 1 down to 35 to 1, as all the easy oil already sucked up & used, mostly burned as gasoline & diesel chemically synthesized at oil refineries worldwide / because piston engines enabled easy conversion in low cost machines of the expanding pressurized combustion gases to shove pistons down to turn the crankshaft output into the transmission & through the wheels to the tires to move the vehicle. Today we have Tesla Model 3 & Y showing the world that lithium ion battery electric vehicles can do this transportation feat without combustion in the vehicle, using electric to make magnetic fields in permanent magenet IPM & induction motors without magnets. Spin the wheels, turn the prop, spin the turbine wheels, make the movement happen!
Food is metabolic energy, & you poop still contains a lot of energy that your body cannot effectively extract. Some people even dry their poop & burn it as a fuel to make heat in a stove heater in homes in colder locals, mostly during the winter / combining poop with dried wood waste & other combustibles like cardboard & paper from packaging materials or shipping boxes when people buy things online or on the TV or via catalogs & their items on moved in flammable energetic packages. Combustable waste burned like this creates air pollution near the home that does this & thats bad for public health nearby. In rural places where people live far apart, this issue more about climate change & less about the very diluted local pollution. In big urban areas that are populated, there are lot of lungs & brains in a small area, so air pollution has a huge negative impact locally. This is why governments are trying to subsidize electric vehicle development & public transportation railways & busses & discourage the use of privately owned cars ^ trucks & SUV's // since the fossil fueled vehicles emit a lot of tailpipe pollutants toxic to human lung & brain cells.
If you want to take a cruise ship tour in Europe for 8 days or 10 days or 12 days, expect to pay $3000-8000 per person, on one of Vikings premier cruise ship tours. They are many to choose from & the coolest ones cost $12K to $17 k per person to visit extreme places & go exploring. Consider that currencies can buy electricity & fuels or time by paying other people or paying for machines & their operating costs to do things you do not want to use your time for. With hydrocarbon liquid fuels, mankind turned to insulating carbon combustion to power societal development & enable faster travel & modern life, but now with billions of people using more energy, the air pollution created driving climate change faster & making toxic air pollutants that sicken people with brain & lung cell damage & worse like cancers from exposure to the vapors fumes & particles in exhaust gases emitted from combustion energy processes, mostly in turbine & piston engines of a myriad of size scales.
On the other end of the spectrum, using google.com/flights to find airfare & travels & hotel deals, you can do a DIY trip & save thousands. Meg & I went to London & Amsterdam, all said the entire trip for 10 days only cost $4600. It could have been better if I had planned more, especially on the restaurant side of things, in London especially. Then again having a free form schedule enabled us to explore more spontaneously, which was super fun in its own right.
We flew on a Boeing 787 both to & from Gatwick airport, UK to get there from Seattle, WA, USA SEA-TAC airport. An UBER picked us up from our home & drove us to our local airport, reverse upon returning. Once in London, England, we used trains & cabs & walked around on foot a lot to get around. We also used a cheap airline to fly from Amsterdam back to London to save time towards the end of the fantastic trip. This was back in 2017 before the COVID19 debacle made travel such a pain.
Energy to power the airplanes & trains & cabs, all fossil fuel energy that produces air pollution (externality of carbon combustion energy). No free lunch in physics, pollution often a cost externalized into the environment in the form of pollutants that harm public & environmental health. Acid rain, fine & super fine particles, hydrocarbon fumes & vapors (think funky exhaust smell) along with neurotoxin carbon monoxide & oxides of nitrogen & sulfur. Combustion not cleaner because of impurities in fuel that are expensive to remove & because air used as the oxidizer nearly 78% nitrogen gas with about 21% oxygen & a trace amount of noble argon & some other very low concentration gases like methane & CO2 (trillions of tons emitted by burning carbon & hydrocarbons)
To move matter or mass requires energy #physics & there is no way around this. This is why heavier cars & SUV's have higher fuel consumption per unit of distance traveled. More mass means more energy needed to move the mass. Larger vehicles also produce more aerodynamic drag, so the air striking them as speed increases, increase the amount of energy required to continue moving forward faster. This means that above 50 mph the air drag increases 3X faster as the third power of the velocity or speed of the vehicle.
Depending on the transmission & final drive & shape of the vehicle, this means that going 70mph can use 2X the amount of fuel per unit of distance travels as going 50mph, but you cover 70 miles per hour of travel vs 50 miles per hour. This is why all airplanes have similar designs to cut through the air at speeds greater than 125 mph & often as high as 700 mph. Ships & boats also have special travel speeds that optimize fuel conservation or they can travel faster & waste fuel even faster. than the increase ratio of speed increase. There are ways around this using hydrofoils that lift the hull out of the water, buts thats not practical to apply to a big cruise ship moving at slower speeds. On a cruise ship, waste heat from the engine used to heat air & water to make warming the cabins & heating water for laundry, shower & dish washing sanitation less costly. Similarly the waste heat from the engines on a cruise ship can be used to desalinate sea water & process it into clean potable water for consumption or hygiene or cooking uses on the ship.
At some level, all human activities can be related to energy costs. Time, money & energy are all interchangeable in a way that time value since everyone dies eventually has an equivalent in money & energy units. For the sake of understanding this, consider the reasons that gasoline, coal, diesel, & other forms of carbon combustion comprise something like 98% of energy consumed worldwide, in transport & logistic mostly, some thermal power plants too & some older homes. ]
Natural gas one of the cleaner burning fuels but its not an endless panacea of limitless energy like breeding nuclear fuels endlessly in renewable Breeder IFR style fission reactors, that for political & social reasons are still very rare, as the pressurized boiling water reactors 2nd gen built from the 1950's through the 1980's & a few under construction or recently built. Most of the 450 commercial nuclear power generating stations on Earth were constructed by Government Funding since private capital does not like to see their money tied up for 20 years, even if the ROI in the 9000% range.
Nuclear Energy in the form of renewable fission fuel cycles in 4th & 5th gen. reactors, can convert fertile elements like Thorium into Fissile elements to burn neutron flux style in fission reactor piles of fuel rods or pellets or spheres with moderators of similar design to control the neutron flux to throttle the reaction.
There are even natural fission reactors in nature where naturally occurring radioactive element in relatively high abundance are near a surface feature that heats air or water & have been utilized as bath places because of the free thermal energy since antiquity. Earths core heat largely driven by the nuclear radioactive decay of certain elements in the Earth's core & crust, namely natural uranium & thorium & their decay products, other isotope formed by the decay series of each radioactive element thats unstable. Thank geothermal energy to nuclear fission processes occurring naturally in nature without humans burning carbon & making climate changing air pollutants toxic to the human brain & lungs. This means we have a path to decarbonization & with 10 billion human people projected to be alive at the same time within 30 years, an urgent global need to decarbonize grid power & transportation, otherwise the biosphere of Earth will become a dystopian polluted place that few if any people would actually enjoy living in.
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