The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Hansen to Australian PM: stop coal plants now

179 comments on Hansen to Australian PM: stop coal plants now

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Cslater8 on April 1, 2008 - 12:44pm

Trucks - don't forget the trucks. Barges etc. will only do so much. Look around you and what do you see? A huge country cris-crossed by highways with trucks transporting goods. How are those huge trucks going to run on a windmill of electric power? You need to stop living in a fishbowl and take a hard good look at reality. 200 million barrels of fossil fuels a day. Don't kid yourself into these other scenarios.

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Bellistner on April 1, 2008 - 2:21pm

Trucks - don't forget the trucks. Barges etc. will only do so much. Look around you and what do you see? A huge country cris-crossed by highways with trucks transporting goods

If long-distance transport of goods is moved from road to rail, we won't need so many trucks. How are you going to maintain the highways?

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Engineer-Poet on April 2, 2008 - 1:17am

Looking around me, I see a couple trains each day which consist of semi-trailers hooked together on rail dollies (run by Triple Crown Services). I've counted 125 trailers being towed by a single locomotive.

The steps look fairly simple to me:

Move freight to rail, either dual-mode trailers or straight rail cars. This saves about 2/3 for the long hauls.
Electrify the rails. This eliminates oil consumption for the long hauls.
Use battery-powered semi-tractors for the short hauls from rail head to loading dock and back. That eliminates oil consumption on the final legs, as well as almost all of the air pollution and most of the noise. The Smith Newton 7.5 ton delivery truck shows that it can be done.

We've got examples out there, we just have to follow them.

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Termoil on April 2, 2008 - 8:29am

How about we just buy less useles stuff to fill our McMansions with and then we won't need so many trucks, trains, barges. Come to think of it, why don't we stop building McMansions and other forms of wasteful dispersed housing, only live in places where food can be grown close to the mouths that eat it.

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