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Team Kool Green was a CART Indycar team. Kool was a cigarette brand. Barry Green was the owner.
Motorcycle Racing Industry: Reading the Tea Leaves
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Biofuel is already a reality. It's blended into US gasoline at the rate of 10%. I'm pretty sure a boutique sport can blend at 40% and then eventually jump to 100% carbon-neutral fuel.
I won't criticize someone for being a skeptic, but you should separate the science and business of biofuel from the political fraud and unpleasant national security directives that dominate the green energy sector. Running a motorcycle on 40% ethanol =/= to Solyndra.
I suppose you could worry that Dorna is taking the laziest approach to biofuel by blending more ethanol into gasoline, but maybe the motorsport fuel industry will surprise us with something more exotic.
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Agree in regard to much of what is being done in the name of carbon neutrality including that the cost of manufacture and the issues with disposal of current technology batteries, and the environmental damage caused by mining rare earths etc don't seem to be getting much consideration. But are you really absolutely confident that putting all the carbon sequestered for the last 300 million or so years, often as a result of mass extinction events, back into the environment in 200 odd years can be done with impunity ?. It is imo a rather major scientific experiment with at best unknown consequences.
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What do you advise as courses of action to limit global warming to 1.5C ?
For starters switch all the coal fired plants around the world to Natural Gas !!!
There are literally thousands of coal fired plants mostly in China, India, and a smattering of other 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world countries.
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When do we switch off the Gas powered electricity plants?
What do we do about transportation?
There are no viable alternatives to fossil fuels at this point for the masses, we'll be using reliable fossil fuels to heat our homes and power our economies for decades to come.
Eventually we will still have a combination of everything, including Hydrogen, mini nukes (they are going to build one where I live here in Pickering Ontario), etc. Toyota is betting on Hydrogen for vehicles, I am slanted towards Hydrogen as such too in hybrid vehicles using it along with electric power.
See the attached chart for the realities going forward, it shows an every increasing reliance on fossil fuels in the real world.
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Australia is well suited for wind and solar renewables as it’s a large land mass surrounded by ocean on all sides with only 27 million population. While wind and solar are cheap they are intermittent so Australia needs to focus on storage which will be batteries and pumped hydro. Nuclear is being talked about but it’s high cost and long lead time will probably result in it not happening in Australia.
Transportation wise the bulk of new car purchases will be electric once the battery prices drop making the purchase price comparable to ICE cars.
Small motorbikes and scooters will all be electric as range around tow won’t be an issue.
Large lifestyle motorbikes is a bit of an unknown as the batteries are too heavy though we will see advances in energy density, I suspect that most will retain their ICE motorbikes paying for expensive bio fuel for the weekend warrior adventure.
For things that add carbon to the atmosphere we will need to remove the equivalent amount to achieve carbon neutrality for example tyres if we continue to use fossil sources for their construction though they could be made from renewable sources including captured carbon
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I will play along and pretend that co2 is a negative and causing global warming.
The solution is nuclear power. But the climate change industry is against nuclear. Why ? Because isn't about the climate. It is about retarding human progress.
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Being against nuclear power is about the risk of an accident/earthquake/etc and the storage of the waste product. Germany has decommissioned its nuclear reactors before decommissioning its coal generation, I think they should of done it the other way - decommission the coal generation first, then the gas and nuclear last, of course that only happens once viable alternatives exist.
For countries such as Australia that have ample access to almost unlimited renewable potential and a low population, nuclear doesn't make sense as its way too expensive, better off to spread wind (onshore and offshore), solar and perhaps a small amount of geothermal around the country, backed up largely by batteries, pumped hydro and existing hydro
Does Canada have more potential for hydro?
Fission would be fabulous, we seem to be stuck with it using more electricity than it produces, I'm not holding my breath on that one
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I think they will just fit every thing, with pedals.
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It’s just about control. The West does not enjoy the geopolitics of energy, particularly oil. Venezuela was under our thumb, but they nationalized and have become a petro terror state. Similar situation with Iran. We collapsed the Soviet Union, but somehow Putin stole it back. Saudi Arabia has been an on again off again ally with a nasty habit of being in the thick of the US’ tribulations. Oil-consuming countries are starting to defy the petrodollar arrangement and our sanctions and embargoes.
Our geopolitical system is under pressure, and with China slipping from our control, there is extreme paranoia within the intelligence agencies that China will develop alternative energy, and we won’t have enough spooks and invest banks operating in China to bend their industry to our will.
We could produce fossil fuels again and jail/kill the OPEC-funded eco-traitors, but it would be rehash of the 60s and 70s. The governments would lose control of the populace since Westerners are inclined to oppose dirty industry broadly. The only way to fix our waning influence is to indoctrinate our own citizenry, and get them to consent to needless suffering in order to prevent loss of control.
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Sure if they can get thorium or fusion to work, but there isn’t an unlimited amount of uranium to power current technology nuclear power stations, and breeder reactors produce some rather nasty stuff called plutonium.
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Earth will doubtless abide, and arguably putting all the CO2 sequestered for the last 200 or 300 million years back into the environment will just return things to a former state which was good for trilobites and cycads at least. Putting it all back into the environment over a time course of 200 years is a fairly major scientific experiment with at best unknown consequences imo though.
But sure, stopping the use of any fossil fuels tomorrow would kill a large number of people who I guess wouldn’t then need to be saved from a climate crisis. It is pretty much the theme of an Avengers movie.
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I agree with the comments that electric bikes are the future, and when the majority of road bikes sold are electric, the manufacturers are going to be wanting top level bike racing to be reflecting their road range. It won't be ultra-quick, but the change-over will happen.
Bikes are more affected by battery weight than cars, but with energy density of batteries rising, while costs of batteries keep on falling, this is a problem that will solve itself. The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers
Clearly affordability is an issue, but again the costs to manufacture electric cars are also falling. Tesla was losing money, but in Feburary at least it has now become the most profitable US car-maker. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/business/stellantis-earnings-electric-vehicles/index.html That article talks about how the company Stellantis (formed by a merger of Fiat/Chrysler/Dodge and PSA) is now turning a profit on EVs.
I believe that bikes will follow more slowly, but the direction of travel - as well as the need to reduce carbon emissions - is very clear.
Bikes are more affected by battery weight than cars, but with energy density of batteries rising, while costs of batteries keep on falling, this is a problem that will solve itself. The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers
Clearly affordability is an issue, but again the costs to manufacture electric cars are also falling. Tesla was losing money, but in Feburary at least it has now become the most profitable US car-maker. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/business/stellantis-earnings-electric-vehicles/index.html That article talks about how the company Stellantis (formed by a merger of Fiat/Chrysler/Dodge and PSA) is now turning a profit on EVs.
I believe that bikes will follow more slowly, but the direction of travel - as well as the need to reduce carbon emissions - is very clear.
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It is becoming common to see electric bikes at the tracks now, I see Starks and Surons every week that I am there. It also seems like all the kids are on electric Stacyc bikes now, and as they grow into riding and racing they may never ride a gas powered bike.
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I think it would be interesting to discuss how much power and battery range electric bikes will need before they are ready for major races. The Ducati Moto E bike has a battery capacity of only 18 kw/h while there are road bikes with about 22 kw/h. Moto2 has about 140hp, and I would think that at least that much will be needed. While Moto2 is slower than MotoGP, I think not slow enough to make the racing unexciting. MotoE races are about 35km, while even Moto3 is about 100km. From that, I would think that about 60kw/h batteries will be needed for races of decent length. But, with current technologies that just won't work on a racing motorcycle I think. Several generations of battery technology are, I would think, necessary.
It's interesting to have MotoE as a sprint race alternative. But, if all races were that short, that would be unsatisfactory.
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We are already there for electric commuter bikes, for something to get you to work or the shops go electric. For lifestyle bikes the energy storage per kilo of battery isn't good enough to get people to switch from their ICE bikes, for them the solution may be bio fuel which will probably be expensive. We shall see come 2035 if the lifestyle bike market dies or the manufacturers manage to make electric lifestyle bikes that tempt buyers.
