[ademonrower]

Great pieces of advice! Thank you! I will start practising the EOC method. With an older car, it's less scary, because there is less to lose when the engine is off :-) Servo-assisted brakes would be a serious one, though...

My book is about energy and material economies of carbon compounds. It's a response to the often misguided strategy of trying to de-carbonize everything. In the chapter on cars, I do very deep analyses of whole economies of manufacture and driving at average mileages in various parts of the world. I always come to the conclusion that the best thing is to keep one's existing car, drive it sparingly, and maintain it well. Nothing else, on average, beats that in terms of energy use, CO2 emissions, environmental impact. I also look at fuels for aviation and shipping. Other chapters compare carbon economies with non-carbon economies in areas such as cement, steel-making etc.

A big focus is on energy storage once you've made it, because that's a very large under-developed aread. Hydrocarbons, in their numerous forms, are very convenient for long-term and short-term energy storage. Re-cycling CO2 from the atmosphere/industry exhaust gases is, across most large industrial sectors, a very advisable strategy to be researching.

Opponents of E-fuels say that they require horrendous amounts of energy to make. True, they are energetically costly, but environmentally they are much less harmful-residue-forming than mineral-based power-solutions, dug up from the Earth's crust, with all the attendant mining pollution problems... and then the toxic recycling wastes (if we ever get into battery recycling in a big way...). E-fuels are much more amenable to making closed-cycle economies of manufacture/recycling with relatively low environmental impact in the long term.

New infrastructures to replace the hydrocarbon-based storage/distribution infrastructures will create a horrendous CO2 bubble of their own during their manufacture, not to mention their own environmental impact (i.e. beyond just the CO2 emissions on which many people are concentrating - to the exclusion of all else). All of this rapid change away from carbon-based energy stores and carriers is going to have horrendous environmental impacts in my analaysis.

My book will be out around July this year. Unfortunately I can't reveal much more about it at the moment, for obvious reasons. By the way, I'm completely freelance, and have no industry connections or membership in industry-related or lobbying-related organizations. I just see this from a concerned-scientist-perspective :-/