Only Local Foods in Antiquity
It was not always like this. For most of human history foods were grown as small farming operations within walking distance to where people who ate the foods lived. It was only with the advent of transportation technologies like boats, ships, trains, trucks, cars, automobiles, horse pulled carts, chariots, we have been making roads to move people and goods long distances, but before modern refrigeration it was not possible or practical or feasible to move ice, or perishable fresh foods long distances from where they were grown and harvested for human consumption.
Fossil Fueling Global Unsustainable Development
Finite fossil fuels made of petroleum or crude oil enabled human societies worldwide with mobile energy in engines like piston engines, rotary engines, steam engines, turbine engines or jet engines, wobble engines, DUKE engine, vane engines, vapor compression engines, water injected engines, electric motors, alternators, magnetos, it was mobile energy and power generation technology for the electrification for lighting and later computer and digital chip function in mobile vehicles and machines that enabled the broad global adoption of automotive technology such that some 2 billion cars are on the worlds roads now, with Americans driving some 3.2 trillion miles in 2023 for example as the most car crazy country.
Consider How Engines Work
But tailpipe pollution results from incomplete combustion. In an unleaded gasoline fueled car for example, the ECU talked sensor data from many sensors in the engine, and calculates to control the fuel pulse duration or rate of fuel injected into the engines air intake or directly injected into the cylinder next to the spark plug. When the piston moves down the volume inside the cylinder increase and the intake valve is open so fuel & air flow into the engine. When the piston reaches the bottom of the stroke the maximum cylinder swept volume achieved consisting of a mixed column of air and gasoline, then the piston starts going up as the crankshaft's offset swings the connecting rod around translating this rotation energy into upward energy to push the piston up compressing the air fuel mixture. When the piston reaches top dead center and just after as it starts to go down again as the connecting rod now pulling on it to complete the 3 stroke, the spark plug also controlled by the ECU sparks creating the activation energy to initialize the flame front kernel formation around the spark plug that deflagrates rapidly producing heat, gas, and pressure to shove the piston down, similar to when your leg is pressing down on the bicycle pedal, to spin the crank, to move the wheels to move the vehicle, usually through a transmissions to introduce different gear rations for starting from a stop or traveling at neighborhoods speeds, or on local roads at slightly higher speeds, or on highways or freeways at even faster speeds, perhaps even doing stop and go in traffic congestion since driving so popular as a way of getting around with heat and air conditioning, music, a comfortable seat, cool or warm calm and collected, fast, easy, but kind of expensive.
The following linked video shows how a flat crank V8 engine by AMG that costs $60,000 can still fail if not tuned properly or rebuilt correctly, after being pulled from a wrecked AMG automobile. AMG are a performance tuning branch of Mercedes Benz Automotive. If people are shopping for a Mercedes, I always recommend the AMG since they are much higher quality!
AMG Engine Failure Video (YouTube) https://youtu.be/15FIY9XHJA0?si=UbzEVMWp4ivn699d
90+% of Transportation Fossil Fueled Today
In this way the fuel burned in the engine proves the mobile energy for most vehicles used by the general public in many different ways to move people and stuff around daily. When Meg & I take her 2010 Prius III to Costco, we spend a few hundred dollars and get hundreds of pounds of stuff, and do this every 3 weeks or so, in what I call a junket trip given the vast amount if mostly foodstuffs that we get while at Costco typically. When the Prius III 2ZR-FXE 1.8 liter 4 cylinder 4 stroke Atkinson cycle engine activates it starts a cold start, when the oil down in the oil pan and the engine near room temperature. It take a few minutes to warm up the engine and light off the catalytic converter, and aftermarket cat & downstream O2 sensor since someone jacked up her parked car & cut out the OEM cat to get money for selling the catalytic convert for its noble metal content.
Consider Engine Cold Start Emissions X Billions of Vehicles
During the cold start the tailpipe emissions smell bad, piston ring blow by products, crank case vapors, unburned fuel from a rich mix to warm the engine slowly, and other fumes are not only stinky they are also toxic. Multiply this cold start emission by billions of vehicles and thats big plume of toxic fumes emitted daily worldwide. Add in tire tread erosion vulcanized rubber dust, brake dust, oil leads, transmissions leaks, and other fluid and grease leaking, fumes, soot, smoke or worse from diesel vehicles, or jet turbine engine exhaust, or coal power emissions, and it becomes clear the carbon energy a dirty toxic emissions nightmare making runaway climate change worse faster while also sicking people and nature with acid rain, fumes, smoke, particulate, vapors and toxic tailpipe emissions bad for human and environmental health.
Fast Fueling Hard Competition
Most industrial farming machines are fueled by diesel with piston engines with high compression and good thermal efficiency that spin at lower speeds like 1800 RPM with full turbocharged power output. They also have the same tailpipe emissions of toxic soot, particles, fumes and worse. Liquid gasoline and diesel are easier than propane or butane to distribute quickly. A typical passenger car driver can drive to a gas station and add 12 gallons of gasoline in under 7 minutes from start to finish, paying at the pump with a credit card or debit card (debit cars are dangerous, credit cards are safer)
Slower EV Charging & Finite Battery Elements Expensive
Charging an EV up to 100X slower, but L3 or best case, only 4X slower, but 4X slower means it takes 30 minutes to add a decent amount of range even with a 350KW level 3 fast charger. There exists a L4 standard of 800VDC at 1000AMPS, but these are research pilot scale chargers that only work with some of the latest luxury EV's using the higher voltage battery packs and able to charge at 800KW or so. But battery electric vehicles are not enough, certainly not without Na-Ion or sodium ion batteries made of Earth abundant minerals and materials widely cheaply available, unlike finite expensive cobalt and lithium using in common EV Li-Ion batteries NCA or similar, though I am a fan of long life LFP or lithium iron phosphate batteries and LiTi or Lithium Titanate like the SCiB from Toshiba used on that cool fast charge electric bicycle.
Electric Bikes & E-Bike Cars
It's electric bicycles that seem to be poised to win the emissions challenge at moving people with cargo stored on the bike or small amounts in a rider worn backpack. I think bicycle cars are really the best bet, as saw examples of low mass enclosed low speed electric assist bicycle vehicles in Amsterdam. Think of an enclosed motorcycle with heating, defrost, air filtering, air conditioning or cooling, more comfortable, with a practical trunk for moving furniture, other smaller vehicles foldable, bags of groceries, or boxes of foods or beverages etc.
Corded & Battery Electric Farming Equipment
On farms, corded and battery electric farm vehicles, with overhead articulating wires, like trams in cities, such that diesel engines can be replaced with grid powered large industrial motors to energize the farming tools or agriculture machines. Even hybrid drivetrains where the diesel engine acts like a hydraulic or electric generator, instead of directly driving the machine mechanism, the engine can operate at its peak efficiency rotation speed into order to use less fuel and lower emissions. By not varying the engine speed, the hybrid drivetrain can achieve significantly lower fuel consumption, improving energy efficiency and cleaning up the air quality around farms, not fogging the food with tailpipe pollution like diesel powered machines do.
Capacitors + Batteries = Higher Performance
I really like ultra & super capacitors that store energy in ionized materials instead of chemical bonds, so they can charge 1000X faster, and give off current at incredible rates. That's while rail-guns use large arrays of charged capacitors to dump huge amount of DC current into the rails to shunt a magnetic field into the projectile launch sabot to get the tungsten penetrator or DU round to 6 miles per second velocity, enough to rip though normal materials like space trash parts that hit satellites causing catastrophic cascade issues that make space trash of commercial importance now. In the early days of Satellites this was not even considered, just as tailpipe or carbon emissions were only recently made a public popular political discourse important topic today under the banner of carbon emissions regulations or carbon credits or reducing carbon emissions.
People Have to Eat to Live
Food the base of society as everyone must eat to live. This is why vehicles are so popular and since gasoline and diesel engines and fuels are practical and cost effective and proven, they continue to be widely utilized even though everyone is starting to see the cracks begin to show as carbon emissions that harm, hurt, poison and sicken and even kill people with preventable diseases. In a way, easily liquid hydrocarbon fuels made from mined oil enabled human activity to scale, increasing the number of people alive, giving rise to globalization and sending us towards 10 billion people alive at the same time, off the end of a cliff called runaway climate change global tipping points exceeded as the USD dollar and other fiat currencies continue to lose value making everything more expensive or making life more unfair for nearly everyone, their children, friends, neighbors, people.
Disclaimer
I am sick with some kind of nasty cold virus that gave me a headache for 3 days straight, ulcerated my throat, sore joints, pain, cloudy thinking, and feel dazed or faded for no reason in particular, so the run-on sentences and way I wrote some of the above information a result of less clear thinking due to being sick.
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