Back to trains, and for this week we discuss one of Britain’s most audacious but ultimately futile projects to revitalise the network in the wake of World War II. However, rather than undertaking a comprehensive rebuild of the network, British Railways was short-changed time and again, ultimately resulting in a facelifted but largely unchanged system that dated back to the Victorian era, though it was much smaller and crippled by far more debt than ever before.
This video was actually a suggestion from an American viewer, who was curious as to why British Rail had such a vast array of diesel locomotives during its early years. 🙂
All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com
The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.
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Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀
References:
– Railways Archive (and their respective sources)
– RMWeb (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)
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The League of Nations is just one manifestation of a broader ideal in the interwar years. Within a palace in the heart of the British Empire, a new conference is underway. It is attended by everyone from H.G. Wells to the Prince of Wales. (more…)
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Joe Lucas — or, more accurately, the company bearing his name — engineered electrical bits for pretty much everything emanating from the UK, and the notorious unreliability of Lucas components played a key role in tanking the British car industry in the early 1980s. Make the jump for “If Lucas made guns, wars would not start,” and other classics.
The Lucas motto: “Get home before dark.”
Lucas is the patent holder for the short circuit.
Lucas — Inventor of the first intermittent wiper.
Lucas — Inventor of the self-dimming headlamp.
The three position Lucas switch — Dim, Flicker and Off.
The Original Anti-Theft Device — Lucas Electrics.
Lucas is an acronym for Loose Unsoldered Connections and Splices
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress
From the Noun Project:
– Mansion By Shane Stieben
– signal by Adrien Coquet
– cowboy man by Adrien Coquet
– signal by Adrien Coquet
– room By Batibull, ES
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Inspector” – David Celeste
– “Wind Chimes” – Farrell Wooten
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Puzzle Of Complexity” – Jo Wandrini
– “What Now” – Golden Age Radio
– “Out the Window” – Wendel Scherer
– “Symphony of the Cold-Blooded” – Christian Andersen
I’m not actually against the spread of electric vehicles — where appropriate — but we’re a long way technically speaking from an all-electric future on the roads. Alongside the vast increase in our electric generation and distribution infrastructure such a change would require, there’s also the practical limitation of what is currently possible in battery technology, and hoped-for improvements will require significant breakthroughs which seem more than just a step beyond our current capabilities:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging. Photo by Nissan UK
“There are liars, damned liars, and battery guys” – or some variation thereof – is an aphorism commonly attributed to US electro-whizz Thomas Edison.
Edison’s anecdotal frustrations remain valid today because scarcely a month goes by without a promised battery revolution, and scarcely a month goes by without that revolution arriving.
In October, for example, The Register encountered Jagdeep Singh, CEO of QuantumScape, a battery startup that boasted a new type of battery that could double the range of electric vehicles, charge in 15 minutes, and is safer than the lithium-ion that dominates the rechargeable market.
“Ten years ago, we embarked on an ambitious goal that most thought was impossible,” Singh said in a canned statement. “Through tireless work, we have developed a new battery technology that is unlike anything else in the world.”
Singh might disprove Edison’s aphorism and deliver the better batteries the world will so clearly appreciate. But to do so he’ll have to buck a 30-year trend that has seen lithium-ion reign supreme.
Why has the industry stalled? The short answer is that chemistry hasn’t found a way to build a better battery.
“The basic concept of what a battery is hasn’t shifted since the 18th century,” says Professor Thomas Maschmeyer, a chemist at the University of Sydney and founding chairman of Gelion Technology, a battery developer. All batteries, Maschmeyer explains, consist of three main building blocks: a positive electrode, called a cathode; a negative electrode, called an anode; and an electrolyte that acts as a catalyst between the two sides. “These three elements cannot change. So, if you want a breakthrough, it must come from a fundamental change in the chemistry,” Maschmeyer says.
Better living through chemistry
Battery boffins have proposed a periodic table’s worth of alternative compounds that could surpass lithium-ion batteries.
These largely fall into two categories. First, batteries that are trying to surpass the energy densities that lithium offers, such as solid-state batteries, lithium-sulphur, and lithium-air. The other is batteries comprised of more abundant materials such as sodium-ion batteries, aluminium-ion, and magnesium-ion batteries.
But changing the chemistry of batteries is easier said than done, says Professor Jacek Jasieniak, a professor of material sciences and engineering at Monash University. He compares changing one element in a battery to changing a chemical in a pharmaceutical. “Often solving one problem exacerbates another,” he says.
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War, poverty, and disease continue to pummel the word in the wake of the Great War. But still, humanity carries on, not only surviving but creating a host of futuristic opportunities in the arts, the economy, and … cheese.
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Archive Research: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
From the Noun Project:
iron cross By Souvik Maity, IN
poverty By Phạm Thanh Lộc, VN
Skull_51748
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Steps in Time” – Golden Age Radio
– “What Now” – Golden Age Radio
– “Sunday Worship” – Radio Night
– “Astray” – Alec Slayne
– “Break Free” – Fabien Tell
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
1 day ago
Welcome back to Between Two Wars! Strap in for what is going to be an exciting ride through the massive cultural, social, economic, and technological shifts that take place after the Great War. We can’t guarantee this will always be a positive tale. These changes entail plenty of fear and suffering, and even ‘fun’ things like the Jazz Age have their darker sides.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that the interwar era is a time of promise where people envision modern futures to replace old pasts. There is everything to play for in this brave new world and a vision of progress all around in politics, culture, food, and more.
Comments Off on War, Cinema, and Cheese! | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.01 – Harvest 1918
The modern world stands on a cairn built by energy conversions in the past. Just as it took many loaves of bread and nosebags of hay to build Salisbury Cathedral, so it took many cubic metres of gas or puffs of wind to power the computer and develop the software on which I write these words. The Industrial Revolution was founded on the discovery of how to convert heat into work, initially via steam. Before that, heat (wood, coal) and work (oxen, people, wind, water) were separate worlds.
To be valuable, any conversion technology must produce reliable, just-in-time power that greatly exceeds — by a factor of seven and upwards — the amount of energy that goes into its extraction, conversion and delivery to a consumer. It is this measure of productivity, EROEI (energy return on energy invested), that limits our choice.
By the EROEI criterion, biofuel is a disastrous choice, requiring about as much tractor fuel to grow as you get out in ethanol or biodiesel. Wind power has a low energy return, because its vast infrastructure is energetically costly and needs replacing every two decades or so (sooner in the case of the offshore turbines whose blades have just expensively failed), while backing up wind with batteries and other power stations reduces the whole system’s productivity. Geothermal too may struggle, because turning warm water into electricity entails waste. Solar power with battery storage also fails the EROEI test in most climates. In the deserts of Arabia, where land is nearly free, sunlight abundant and gas cheap, solar power backed up with gas at night may be cheap.
Fossil fuels have amply repaid their energy cost so far, but the margin is falling as we seek gas and oil from tighter rocks and more remote regions. Nuclear fission passes the EROEI test with flying colours but remains costly because of ornate regulation.
(FILM ID:1549.07)
Full title reads: “Goodbye To Steam”
Intertitle reads: “British Railways meet the challenge of the age of abundant power”
Angle shot, railway engine going past camera. GV Outside one of the large London Railway stations showing railway lines and train coming out of station. CU Man in signal box, pan to show him pulling levers. CU Signal going up. GV Train coming towards camera. GV Steam train. GV Aerial shots steam train. CU Man filming from plane. CU man in plane fitting equipment and then giving thumb’s up sign. GV Aerial shot, railway lines. CU Man filming from plane. Steam train going along line. SV Draughtsmen in office. CU Men looking through magnifier at a plan. CU Magnified picture of plan, zoom to show Railway chiefs seated round table with plan, among them is Sir Philip Warter. SV Elevated, railway chiefs looking at plan. CU One of the railway executives. SV Man with model of section of railway line which he places on the table and the railway executives study it. CU Sign reading “Kent Coast Electrification Widening to Provide Four Tracks”, pan to show railway line with only two tracks. GV Kent Coast line with men on bridge. SV Bridge with surveyor. CU Surveyor looking through theodolite. GV Tracking shot of men working. GV Men working at side of railway line with clouds of smoke coming from wood. CU New diesel engine. CU Sir Brian Robertson talking to train driver. CU People watching. CU Sir Brian Robertson blowing whistle. CU Int. diesel engine with driver operating controls. SV Diesel train moving out of station. CU Driver of diesel train. CU. Sir Brian Robertson sitting in carriage. LV Through window of diesel cab as train enters tunnel. SV Three engines on lines. CU Front of one of the engines with plate reading “Cornish Riviera Express”. CU Driver. SV Cornish Riviera Express in station. SV Woman taking in washing because smoke is billowing up from railway lines beside her garden. GV Cornish Riviera Express coming towards camera.
CU Front of steam train “The Bristolian”. SV along top of engine as blows off steam. CU Hand pulling chain. CU valve. GV Platform. CU shovelling coal. GV As train goes along. CU Driver of train. CU Driver. CU Fireman. CU Fire with coal being shovelled. SV Looking over coal tender. SV From driver’s cab of train going under bridge and out the other side. CU Driver. GV From driver’s cab of railway lines with another steam train. SV Int. class for instruction of diesel engine drivers. CU Lecturer talks about metal object. CU Men looking at machinery. SV Royal Scot in station. CU Driver of Royal Scot. GV Activities on platform in which Royal Scot is standing. GV Royal Scot leaving station. GV Building with sign, “English Electric Co. Ltd. Preston”. GV Int. of workshop showing men working on armatures. GV Ext. of building with “Vulcan Locomotives” painted on wall. GV Int. of workshop showing men working on railway engines. CU Man working inside railway engine. GV Workshop. SV Diesel train in station. CU Driver of diesel. GV railway lines in front of train as it moves along. SV Int. dining car in diesel train with attendant pouring coffee. GV Looking through cab window of railway lines in front of train as it goes under bridge and straight past station. CU Glass panel in door with “York Signal Box, Strictly Private”, door opens. SV Man sitting at control panel of box, he reaches over to controls. CU Man’s hands working controls. CU Plan on wall showing different lines and points. CU Hand pushing buttons. CU Signals. CU Point on lines. GV Steam train along lines. CU Train in museum. CU Compartment of old train. SV Ancient train “Locomotion 1828”. SV Diesel Locomotive. CU “Deltic” written on side. GV Deltic. GV Train in station. Various shots in Deltic carriage. SV Coal trucks. SV Railway worker attaching pipe to train. GV Calder Hall Nuclear / Atomic Power station. GV Electrical pylons and cables. GV Diesel train “Sir Brian Robertson” in platform with crowds. GV Crowds. SV “Sir Brian Robertson” unveiled by Mr Grand, General Manager of the Western Region of British Railways. SV Crowd. SV Sir Brian Robertson by train. CU Sign “Sir Brian Robertson”. GV The “Sir Brian Robertson” leaving Paddington Station. SV Steam train letting out smoke. CU Signals. GV Steam train. CU Train over the points. GV steam train leaving clouds of smoke.
Under the yoke of economic depression and more and more authoritarian rulers, Western women face renewed misogyny, patriarchy, and decreasing independence. But not all women think this is such a bad thing.
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Sophisticated Gentlemen” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Magnificent March 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Step On It 5” – Magnus Ringblom
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Step Lightly” – Farrell Wooten
– “Try and Catch Us Now” – David Celeste
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “The Dominion” – Bonnie Grace
– “The Charleston 3” – HÃ¥kan Eriksson
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
So, we take a little break from the geopolitical developments in 1938 to look at the situation of women in the Western World in 1938. We’ve received a lot of requests on the WW2 channel to cover the situation on the home fronts. While we do mention it in the weekly episodes, and War Against Humanity covers the horrid parts of it, WWII was so much more. It literally changed the world’s culture in just six years. To do that subject justice we have asked Anna to join us as host for a new monthly WW2 series: On the Homefront.
A few years back Anna was a regular feature on German YouTube on her own channel and some of the bigger YouTube entertainment channels. She left YouTube to finish her studies, and because she was searching for more depth than YT entertainment content was offering her. As Astrid’s and my daughter, and having grown up with Indy around all the time, she has a passion for human history form childhood, especially cultural history.
She also has a personal relationship to this time through her grandparents, Herbert and Renate, Astrid’s parents who served in Germany during the war, on the front and at home. Herbert, a career administrator and later NCO in the Wehrmacht engineer corps, went on after the war to work for the British as translator, and then as a public servant supporting the creation of the Bundeswehr, the German defense forces, and eventually Germany’s contribution as NATO member.
Renate’s father, a bank director, died under mysterious circumstance in 1936 after repeatedly refusing to pay out money belonging to Jewish families to the Nazis. Her mother and sisters soldiered on under the Nazis as best they could, When the war broke out they first suffered under the Allied bombing, losing their home three times. When the bombing became a daily occurrence, Renate was drafted to the German flak and only barely survived the war.
Several years after the war Herbert and Renate met and started a family together. They both passed away only a few years ago, late enough so that Anna had a chance to spend countless hours over 23 years listening to their war stories, and what they took away from it: hope for a better world, and the knowledge that what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945, must never happen again. Please join us to welcome Anna, our daughter to TimeGhost.
Spartacus
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Some will take this as proof that the system of Bitcoin shouldn’t exist, even that we should attempt to close it down. For it is, according to these calculations, using vast amounts of energy:
Just one Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as a British household for nearly two months, new figures have shown.
The amount of energy needed to run the cryptocurrency has soared to record annual highs of 77.78 terawatt hours the same as the entire electrical consumption of Chile.
The carbon footprint of a single transaction is the same as 780,650 Visa transactions or spending 52,043 hours watching YouTube, according to calculations by Alex de Vries, a blockchain specialist, at PWC.
“People react with disbelief, but the figures are true,” said Mr de Vries who founded the Digiconomist blog to highlight the impact.
At Spiked, Rob Lyons looks at the British government’s recent decision to ban sales of internal-combustion cars in 2035 rather than the earlier target date of 2040:
Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging. Photo by Nissan UK
First, at present, electric vehicles cost a lot more than those with internal-combustion engines. For example, one car-buying advice website notes that the Peugeot e-208 is as much as £6,200 more than the standard 208 model. There are government subsidies to help with the cost of electric cars (currently £3,500), but can this be sustained if we all switch? It has already been cut from £4,500 in 2018.
That said, while the purchase price of an electric car may be higher, charging is a lot cheaper than fuelling a regular car. Electric vehicles cost between £4 to £6 per 100 miles to charge at home and £8 to £10 using public charge points, while petrol and diesel cars cost £13 to £16 per 100 miles in fuel (although 60 per cent of the fuel cost is tax).
In theory, maintenance should be cheaper, too, given that electric motors have fewer moving parts than petrol or diesel engines. But to further complicate matters, batteries gradually lose their capacity to hold charge over time. They have to be replaced at the cost of thousands of pounds every few years. (The warranties covering battery replacement varies by manufacturer: Tesla, for instance, offers an eight-year warranty, but the Renault Zoe is covered for just three years.)
Electric cars may be cheaper to own overall, but this is largely down to subsidies and tax breaks, including lower vehicle duties and not having to pay charges in low-emission zones. Still, with the entire car industry throwing its efforts into making electric cars cheaper and increasing battery capacity, costs may well come down somewhat, reducing the need for such breaks. Fingers crossed.
The cost to individual owners will be higher, but the costs to build up the electric charging infrastructure will be distributed among all consumers, not just the owners of vehicles:
This brings us to perhaps the biggest problem: where will the power come from and how will it reach us? Eventually shifting all the energy for cars from oil to electricity means producing much more electricity. Greens are pleased that electricity use is currently decreasing, and a greater proportion of electricity is coming from renewable sources. But the arrival of electric cars en masse would demand a whole lot more electricity, mostly to be used at night.
Unless we want to coat the landscape in wind turbines, which are unreliable in any event, we’ll need other sources of power. More nuclear? Fine by me. But will eco-warriors stand for that? Even if we can produce the juice, having lots of cars charging in the same area may overwhelm the local electricity networks. Who is going to pay for the upgrade?
When all of these factors are considered we have to ask if all this effort will really reduce greenhouse-gas emissions anyway. Digging up the resources required to create all those batteries will be hugely carbon-intensive. Perhaps the most likely outcome of banning sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles is that demand for second-hand vehicles will go up. We could end up like Cubans, nursing venerable old cars for years, way beyond their intended lifespans.
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Hector Drummond indulges in a proper “Fisking” of a recent column in the Telegraph:
We don’t have to buy into the apocalyptic angst of Greta Thunberg, on show again in Davos yesterday, to recognise that something has to be done.
He actually said “Something Has To Be Done”. How about we do a snow dance, Philip? That’s “something”.
Whether or not you are a sceptic about the impact of CO2 on the climate or question man’s involvement in producing the greenhouse gas, our energy future is a non-carbon one, like it or not.
Our energy future involves a lot of talk about non-carbon energy sources, while relying on “carbon” for a long time to come.
Virtually every government has committed to this as an overt aspect of public policy and those that haven’t, like China or the US, have a rapidly growing green energy sector poised to exploit the move to a carbon‑free future.
You mean the China that’s building coal-fired power plants at a rate of knots? That China?
Later on, the column invokes Pascal’s Wager, which Hector finds both amusing and irritating:
Seriously? Pascal’s Wager, which has been long ridiculed by most scientists and philosophers and thinkers, is now the basis for the largest and riskiest economic and political transformation in human history?
Pascal’s Wager justifies any proposed change in response to any possible threat. It’s possible that all the ducks in the world are really super-intelligent and they’re about to launch a takeover, so we need to kill them all. It’s possible that nylon stockings are eventually going to cause a nuclear explosion. Make your own ones up. The consequences of doing nothing, should these claims turns out to be true, are calamitous. In fact, they’re far more calamitous than most of the possible climate change scenarios.
Proper risk analysis, on the other hand, tells us to look at probabilities of the possible bad outcomes, not just how bad some possible bad outcome would be, were it true. The catastrophic climate change scenarios all have tiny probabilities. Even the IPCC admits that.
[…]
Then we have to look at the costs of the proposed action. The real costs, that is, not just vague claims like “Oh, moving everything to solar energy would be, like, you know, cool, my friend went to this talk once and she said that apparently solar works just as well as coal”. The costs – the real costs – are what needs be weighed against alternative courses of action.
The costs of abandoning fossil fuels are not zero. Not even remotely. Changing to renewables will be massively expensive, destroy jobs, and hinder prosperity, because they cannot provide anywhere near the energy we need. “Generate growth and prosperity” is nonsense, and Johnston should be ashamed of himself for falling for this.
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The electrical age was ushered in by Thomas Edison’s illumination of Menlo Park 140 years ago. For the first time, electrical lighting was demonstrated to a public audience.
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Tom Maeden and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Tom Maeden
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Traditional – “Carol of the Bells”
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
4 hours ago
On the eighth day of Christmas Thomas Alva Edison said: let there be light. Now, as we say say in the video, we know that Edison was not the only inventor of incandescent light, perhaps not even the inventor at all. But as with so many other things he brought the world, he was the first one to make it practicable, and perhaps more importantly; make it popular.
It’s hard to fathom how monumental to humanity this day, 31st of December, 1879 is — the world literally changed forever with the flick of a switch. Our work behavior, or sleeping patterns, our leisure time, socializing, sex, media, industry, cooking, aesthetics … well more or less everything started to change on this day. In 2019 hardly anything we do is possible without it — especially not watching this video, which after all is brought to your eyes by one of many, many derivative innovations of the incandescent light bulb. In fact it’s 140 years later and we are still researching the depths of the change that incandescent light brought upon humanity.
Most of us take it for granted by now, artists celebrate it, entire industries depend on it, Luddites deplore it, environmental studies are showing that it might be harmful to other animals, neurologists are researching the effects of changed sleeping patterns on your brains, the production of energy we need to light our world has contributed to dramatic environmental changes on the entire planet, and the innovations coming from it just keep on pouring out of labs like Menlow Park every day. What do you think?
Happy New Year! May it be enlightening.
Comments Off on Let there be LIGHT! – December 31st – TimeGhost of Christmas Day 8
In Quadrant, Tim Blair recounts the story of a friend crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge only to find his vehicle was on fire:
A BMW on fire in Portland, Oregon. Photo by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons.
Most of us manage to scrape through life with no such flame-related driving incidents. Future motorists, however, may find themselves more frequently enjoying the occasional car-b-que. That’s because electric cars — the things Labor ruinously attempted to force upon us as part of their spectacular 2019 election campaign disaster — seem to be impressively prone to burning.
Now, an ordinary car fire is not really that big a deal. Catch it early enough and it can be quickly dealt with. But a fire involving an electric car is a whole different matter. Those things are like four-wheeled infinity candles.
In the manner of all the money given to its manufacturer by various governments, an electric Tesla recently torched itself in Austria. The Tesla’s fifty-seven-year-old driver had slid off the road and struck a tree, prompting a fire emergency.
In ordinary car blaze cases, a single fire engine or even a personal fire extinguisher is sufficient to deal with the problem. Electric cars, or EVs, demand slightly more attention when combustion occurs. Here’s an online news account:
In order to put out the fire, the street had to be closed and fire authorities had to bring in a container user to cool the vehicle.
Some 11,000 litres of water are needed to finally extinguish a burning Tesla but an average fire engine only carries around 2,000 litres of water.
The container used is said to be suitable for all common electric vehicles. It measures 6.8 metres long, 2.4 metres wide and 1.5 metres high, it is (obviously) waterproof and weighs three tons.
Moreover, “fire brigade spokesman Peter Hölzl warned that the car could still catch fire for up to three days after the initial fire”.
I’ve owned one or two cars that were sensibly equipped with fire extinguishers. Future motorists may wish to tow around a lake, just in case their earth-friendly electric cars decide to go the full kaboom.
Earlier this month in Foreign Policy, Jason Hickel wrote about the requirements for expanding current renewable energy generation (wind and solar):
The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.
We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes — but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.
In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions — and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.
In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium — an essential element in wind turbines — extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.
The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.
And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium — an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.
That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four — all for the entire period from now to 2050.
Wind turbines require a lot of concrete to stabilize them on site (hundreds of tons of it), and that concrete is very carbon-intensive to create in the first place (nearly 930 Kg of CO2 per 1,000 Kg of cement), but even those huge turbine blades have a limited working lifespan and can’t be easily recycled into anything economically, so they generally end up in landfills.
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