We need radical innovations that enable market forces to profitably restore eco-systems, to rebuilt forests, streams, rivers, lakes, to make agriculture use 90% less water by making water more expensive to encourage water conservation technology. Draconian outlaws & bans will not work because people will cheat to make use of fuels that have 15-45X better energy density than the best Lithium Ion EV batteries of today.
We need radical innovation in order to immediately start greening the biosphere with more plants & trees, to clean up stream & lakes with more forest soil creation, with compost, with biomass optimization, soil manufacturing using mushrooms to break down biological waste, bio-fuels, new ways to capture plastic from the oceans & algae from blooms and turn them into liquid transportation or gaseous fuels. We can make abundant EV batteries by bypassing lithium & no cobalt, suing Na-Ion or sodium ion batteries. We can even go back to using NiMH for EV's, since it works way better than Li-Ion in very cold weather, like EV' you might drive to go skiing or snowboarding all day :)
We are going to space with robots to bring back large asteroids full of gold, platinum, osmium, silver, palladium and other PGMS, copper, iron, nickel & more :) Space based mining of valuable metals becomes profitable because Earth' based mines now have to move 5 tons of rock to get 1 oz of gold. These diminishing returns of conventional mining make it feasible to mine celestial bodies nearby the moon or Earth that happen to be passing through space.
Earth always losing water to space, but many comets are 80% water & constantly bring new water to the Earth. Space offers nearly limitless access to abundant resources, but all the protons & electrons in space make traveling through space very destructive to spacecraft & very toxic to astronauts unless the spacecraft has a very powerful artificial magnetosphere protection system to shove dangerous ions & other particles away & good shielding to protect the gut microbes of humans traveling in space, since we cannot live without microbes in our gut that are easily killed off by neutrons, protons & other high energy ionizing radiation like X-ray & gamma rays. Space is dangerous radiative & energetic & toxic to the proteins & enzymes essential for cell life in the human body.
Greening up forests that have been cut down with logging & then setting those restored areas aside for 200 years with restrictions against cutting anything down. Rotating where we cut down forests.
Reduce wood use. If people can make furniture & other goods from used chop sticks, then a lot of construction waste can be sorted & up cycled into resources to make things. We need enhanced waste recovery, waste combustion to energy & district heating, metal recovery from burned trash ash, radically improve plastic, glass & metal recycling. Reusing bags & boxes a great way to cut down on forest destruction & nasty emissions from new plastic manufacturing upstream petrochemical inputs & corresponding crude oil mining & refining emissions.
Improving fuel economy of new cars & SUV's very important since petrochemical gasoline & diesel fuels will be around for the next 100 years. All this zealot EV technology still the wild west as battery technology will continue radically improving. Let me show you how fast battery technology has improved just since 1859 when Lead Acid was invented, & in 1901 when Nickel Iron invented, as the only rechargeable that were widely commercially available for electrifying vehicle drive motors or similar SLI applications in ICE vehicles.
Early slower EV's in the late 1800 & early 1900's had PbA flood batteries or NiFe batteries & were able to go upto 20 miles per hour for around 15 miles. Gasoline internal combustion engines were dirty, smelly, hard to start, & gasoline was lower octane & not widely available at this time. Cars were a luxury item sold in large cites to a tiny percentage of the opulent rich who could actually afford the emerging car products or new vehicles back then. Early EV's were selling for around $60,000 eq 2023 so not something the average working person could afford. It was the FORD Model T that made a car available for around $4500 eq 2023. These price estimates are roughly adjusted for inflation of the US dollar since then.
In 1899 NiCD batteries invented, but it would take until the 1940's before they became widely available outside use in aircraft engine starting applications where they were 30-40% lower mass than similar peak CCA starting lighting & ignition PbA or flooded lead acid batteries. It was the Sub-C NiCD cell that enabled broad commercialization in portable electronics & power tool batteries.
While NiFe & PbA last longer when kept fully charged, NiCD has memory problems when charge cycling & lasts longest when its fast charged at high C rates to full at 1.47vdc , then used until zero percentage stage of charge and stored a 1vdc discharged. Some accident long life battery winners of power tools with NiCD batteries would charge their tool battery, put it in the tool, use the tool a little, then put the tool with the battery in it back in the case. In this way the tools NiCD battery was never stored full & used until short bursts until discharged. People using NiCD power tools sparingly & sporadically like this were getting 20 years of use out of the NiCD battery packs, like the 18v Dewalt OG NiCD power tool batteries.
This means that a NiCD battery electric vehicle would have to be charged at 50kW until full, then driven until it has almost no range left, then stored with a low state of charge, and unless you wanted it to develop capacity loss memory issue, you would always have to fully discharge the NiCD battery to nearly no remaining range & park the car with almost no charge in the NiCD to give the NiCD battery longer life. CADEX battery charging company was started as the genius founder figured out intelligent smart charging methods for NiCD battery, hence the name CADEX based on Cadmium Exerciser / Then this brilliant pair of inventors created NiMH batteries in 1949 that have 30-40 lower mass than NiCD batteries.
By 1989 Sony of Japan was developing the Walk-Man & its engineers were seeking a battery technology with better power & energy density than NiMH or NiCD which were the only small portable electronics batteries being made in Japan at this time. While Pentagon contractors & defense technology subsidiaries & related military equipment manufacturers had been producing primary & secondary Li-Ion batteries for intercontinental ballistic missile silos & similar portable stinger missile systems & other MOTS or military off-the-shelf available at the supply depot tech, this Lithium Ion battery was kept secret since its early development in the 1960's. So we could have been commercialized BEV's with lithium ion batteries in America since the 1970's, but oil prices steadily declined such that gasoline became cheaper & cheaper & resulted in the lowest adjusted for inflation cost of just less than $0.99/gal at a time when the dollar had become weaker such that lower prices before that actually cost more in terms of consumer price index or actual cost adjusted for inflation or basically gasoline became the cheapest ever by 1999 in America. Gasoline contains more than 33.5 kWh of chemical energy per gallon, while more ICE or internal combustion engines in cars & SUV's convert about 35% of that fuel energy into vehicle motive power, so around 10kWh per gallon.
This means a 10 gallon gasoline tank gives a convention fossil fuel vehicle around 100kWh of fuel energy to go 200-350 miles, or in EV terms achieves 2-3.5 mi /kWh eq. Our 2019 Nissan LEAF SV has a 40kWh battery & currently gets 3.9 mi/ kWh even though its motor 95% energy efficient at translating battery energy into vehicle motion, the 40kWh battery pack 4 years old and only holds around 37kWh of energy, just more than 1 gallon of gasoline. This means electric vehicles with batteries need batteries with similar energy density to gasoline in order to have operating parity that can sell to most new car buyers who might only be able to charge for 30 minutes per week, like they gas up their conventional cars in less than 15 min per week. So Faster Level 4 DC 10 min charging at 800-1000 kW peak needed to give EV's gas station like recharging speeds equal to a typical gas station refueling.
Today common EV Li-Ion batteries are around 280 watt-hours per kilogram, while gasoline around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. So EV batteries need to be radically innovated with much higher energy density, much faster charging rates, much better heat resistance to not be damaged by L4 ultra fast 10 min charging & need to give 350-1000 mi range per charge, need to be fireproof, need to last 3000-10,000 deep cycles, need to work when frozen to -40 F / C / and need to be way better than any lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles as of 2023.
Tesla 4680 Tab-less mass produced Lithium NMC batteries with more aluminum, copper & nickel & 20x less cobalt, were able to cost optimized large formate EV batteries down to just $57/kWh which means a production cost of $7000 for a 100kWh EV battery pack, so $3500 for 50 kWh pack & the upcoming entry level Tesla Model 2 for 2025+ MY going to offer 250 mi range for under $25,000, undercutting even the Chevy Bolt lineup from GM for cost per unit of range in an EV :) This is with Lithium Ion batteries that have 20x lower energy density than common transportation fuels.
Look at the charge bellow for energy by mass or energy by volume of common fuels and other energy storage mechanism like body fat for body energy or black coal or methanol, wood as biomass. You might think high pressure or cryogenic Hydrogen or H2 sounds energy dense or volumetrically dense, but I assure you that using hydrogen expensive & complicated. Think $18/ gal to fill H2 into a Toyota Mirai or Honda Clarity & only a tiny number of Brown H2 filling stations with H2 made from the emissions intensive steam reformation of natural gas. Renewable Green H2 even more expensive, so $25/30 / gal to refuel fuel-cell electric vehicles.
This is why EV's like the Tesla Model 3 are the best selling electric car today, because anyone can L1 charge using the included EVSE to add 2-4 mi range per hour while their car is parked overnight, by pugging the EVSE extension cord into a normal outdoor power outlet that people often plug Christmas lights into! I charge my 19 Nissan LEAF SV with its L1 EVSE cable off the deck of our ground level apartment by plugging into a normal power outlet, into which I have some LED holiday lights of very low water plugged into the other socket, since a normal power outlet has two sockets & the EVSE plug only uses one socket :) The LED lights are wrapped around the bannister of the deck fencing around the patio. I park the EV as close as possible, but also have a 12-3 extension cord of 50ft that enables me to charge my LEAF from most nearby parking spaces, especially since the EVSE cord also about 20 ft, so I can reach around 70 ft from the deck outlet to plug-in to the front J1772 port on the Nissan LEAF.
Lithium Sulfur batteries get up to 600wh/kg with similar volumetric performance, or 2.5x better than Li-Ion chemistries, but LiS suffered from very short 50 cycle to failure limitations until just recently when research showed how to extend Li-S battery cycling to 2000 cycles, a 40x improvement to cycle life. In an EV cycle life of the battery tells you how many times you can recharge the battery.
Na-Ion being commercialized with 30% lower energy density than similar Li-Ion batteries in order to cope with scaling production to make billions of EV's to replace ICE conventional vehicles around the world. This motivated by the urgent global need to address climate change, reduce acid rain, radically reduce air pollution near cities, in traffic congestion zones, & to stop releasing so much anthropogenic carbon into Earths atmosphere, where the CO2 increases alone would not be as bad, but there are tipping points where positive feedbacks happen in the Atmosphere that trigger rapid warming or cooling, so more deadly heat waves or new ice age events, think super extreme climate change that comes on rapidly, not just because of rising CO2 levels, but because global warming releases CO2 from the Ocean, swamps, bogs, lakes, streams, & the forests which have more severe drought & forest fires that are larger in area & more intense.
Global warming because of the green house gas effect of CO2, but also methane released as fart gas from billions of people & cows & pigs & biogas leaking out of trash dumps & leaking natural gas pipes. Its not just the CO2 emitted by combustion, but toxic oxides of nitrogen that harm public health, creating acid rain that acidifies bodies of water toxic to marine life & bad by reducing revenues or lower profits in fisheries or in the fishing industry.
We have to radically improve fish farming to address the biodiversity losses in the oceans. Human activity so negative that it's making extinction events happen more often causing irriversiable losses of species, losses of biodiversity, losses of eco-system functions. These eco-systems in nature provide our food, air & water.
We are literally cheating future generations with inconsiderate thoughtless toxic industrialization. For eco-friendly changes to happen they have to be brought about by market forces, I am talking about 15% returns on emerging cleaner safer better technologies, profitable innovation that improves the environments, that makes nature healthier and more abundant, that makes ecosystems thrive, that increases wealth & prosperity by making more people more money & making the world a nice place for all life on Earth in the Biosphere, in the Oceans & in other landscapes & bodies of water.
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