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Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr
I am favorable to biofuels that can be somewhat diversified when it comes to their feedstocks, such as ethanol and biodiesel, or biomethane too. And these options can also be integrated with food production.
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The burning of things to power thousands or millions of individual vehicles is an archaic form of energy usage. If you could hypothetically switch all vehicles to electric, and burn gasoline in a centralized generator to charge them, you would not only have a SINGLE emissions source to keep clean, but also the economy of scale would work in your favor. But at that point, why not switch the generator to a biofuel such as biomethane (which is a "free" byproduct of organic processing of waste), solar, wind, nuclear, or a combination?
That's the thing here, any sort of combustion engine is old tech. It's like coal. It did a wonderful thing in industrializing us or moving technology forward, but it's fundamentally limited, and its usefulness is closing out. Not only when speaking of the system as a whole (extraction, production, and transportation of fuel oil), but on an individual level as well.
Know what I don't have to worry about in my electric car? Oil changes. Alternators. Water pumps. Spark plugs. Air filters. Transmissions. Radiators. Catalytic converters. My old Yaris got me a lifetime 44 MPG, but I still had to change oil every 5,000-7,500 miles, which is more waste that gets put back into the world to be processed again.
Again the only limiting factor right now on electric vehicles is battery production, the rest of the vehicle is dead simple compared to a "traditional" car. And while in objective reality the world is definitely NO GOOD at producing batteries without destroying the ****ing planet, IN THEORY it could be (AND SHOULD BE) much much much cleaner and more sustainable in the long term than any form of combustion as our motive power.