Antoinetta III, you are right, of course.

Actually, you want the most money to be made by old people. You get a faster return on your investment through the higher rate of the estate tax vs. income tax.

Damn right it's possible! After just about 100 years of tweaking and massaging the ICE, with millions of dollars spent on research and development, we're still stuck at about 30% maximum efficiency. No amount of electronically controlled ignition, fuel injection, variable valve timing, variable length intake manifolds, supercharging, turbocharging or (insert favorite technology here), has been able to get past the theoretical limit of efficiency set by the laws of thermodynamics.

On the other hand, electric drive trains, batteries and electronic systems have theoretical efficiencies that can exceed 80%. What will the efficiency of a typical battery electric vehicle be, after 50 years of R&D at the level that has been devoted to the ICE?

Alan from the islands

Okay, since you asked:

Brown Goes Green: UPS adds 50 new HEV trucks to delivery fleet

In case you think that's hot air, this one ain't no freakin hybrid

Brown goes green in NYC: Full-sized UPS EV truck

Neither is this one from the city of London

Modec truck looks great in UPS brown

For a little balance

FedEx puts 2 million miles on hybrid trucks, adds 75 more

Let's look at something a little heavier, the one in the background

Confirmed: Smith electric to build the Ampere and the Faraday II

Unfortunately you may not be seeing the above stateside

Bad economy prompts Smith Electric vehicles to curtail expansion

If you're gonna pick on a Prius, make sure his bigger Japanese cousin isn't around

Mitsubishi Fuso's new Green Truck

How about a real heavy duty hybrid

Volvo revving up its trucks with heavy-duty hybrid drivetrains

Here's a couple of hybrids from closer to home

Peterbilt shows off medium-duty hybrid truck
Eaton confirms order from Coke for 120 hybrid trucks
Peterbilt, Eaton and Wal-Mart partner on diesel-electric hybrid truck

Now, "about moving real 18 wheel trucks"

Heavy duty (really heavy duty) electric truck in use at LA port

All the above are not vaporware but actual working trucks, albeit most of them are being evaluated. They were all found by searching just one web site, Autobloggreen.com.

A google search for "electric truck reminded me that some of the biggest beasts of them all, the giant earth movers, have always been diesel electric hybrids. It was actually easier to use electric motors to transfer the huge amounts of power to the wheels, than to use a mechanical transmission. Many of the "stradle carriers" used in container terminals around the world to shuffle the containers around, are diesel electric hybrids as well.

With diesel fuel getting more expensive and in some places impossible to get, while batteries are likely to get better and less expensive, making the leap from diesel electric to battery electric doesn't seem too far fetched. This is certainly applicanle for short haul trips within a city or from a rail line to a factory or distribution center.

Alan from the islands

On the 16 July DrumBeat, I pointed to a mini tropical mess over Florida. It exhibited lots of circulation and the tight circulation on the radar image looked much like a hurricane. As it drifted towards the East, both NOAA and NWS let it drop off their area of concern. Well, this afternoon, the thing has popped up again off the coast of South Carolina. It even has been given a new designation, 03L. The disturbance is beginning to look like a real tropical storm, as it picks up steam (literally) over the Florida Current. Just a reminder that the O.C.S. off the Eastern U.S. is another spot likely to expierence hurricanes, etc.

E. Swanson

I'm actually pretty doomerish, but I don't at all buy that we should sit and wait vs doing all we can to change the outcome. Watching and waiting is one more flavor of BAU.

Trucks CAN go away, though, as can airplanes. It will hurt economically, but fundamentally those modes add a speed value for transport (the time is money part of the equation) rather than transport itself.

The economy WILL optimize for higher energy, and there was a time not too long ago when barge and rail was a much bigger fraction of shipping and trucking was a lot less. 1950 wasn't the dark ages.

I know there is value in painting a bleak picture to get people's attention, but the intention must be to encourage production change. Depression is valueless, while apprehension can be channeled, and knowledge IS power.

We cannot say "none of these options is good enough, so let's get the dying started". We have to look at the options, and pick at least the top handful to undertake as best we can. Chances are some will not work out, but some will do better than expected.

And when it comes to the extra 6 billion, my goal is that my family is not part of the excess. Rational self-interest is a powerful force.

Yup, and I immediately said, "Boy, it's late. I guess we best get busy planning and figuring out the infrastructure investments".

What better day to start than today?

Who knows, maybe a 10% decline in us driving and a recession in China might buy us a few more years, and we'd start the turbines spinning just about the time the peak manifests, and have Gore's terawatts before Ghawar goes away.

The nice thing about wind power is that the incremental return will start accruing as the first units come on-line. At some not-so-distant point the averted energy cost of oil could fund continuing expansion, with a positive marginal return with each new installation.

The highway system wasn't built all at once -- they built some, and liked it, and built more. It seems like we've built enough turbines (and PV, and thermal solar) to see that we like it. Let's build more.

Again, what else would YOU have us do? Start digging our graves and drawing straws?

Before we had interstates, we didn't have 18 wheelers, or none to speak of. Barge to the docks, rail to the interior, truck to the destination. Local delivery CAN be done lots of ways, including with oil. But we CAN save a lot by getting trucks off the roads. It takes a driver and a 400hp motor for each container, while on a train it takes a handful of engineers and a few thousand hp to pull hundreds.

There USED TO BE trains by every warehouse. There can be again. Sure, it'll be painful and expensive, and there might be shortages. The point is there is still time RIGHT NOW to make such changes, and there are no shortages RIGHT NOW. Local businesses can still be served by local trucks (they're not 18 wheelers now unless they're coming from an interstate distribution center), which can be hybrid or electric. That's just a few years out, if that. Europe doesn't use 18 wheelers for delivery much at all, in the places I've been. Neither does India, and they still have restaurants and shops.

Money is the least issue. If it's creating durable value, it should be a net positive for the economy, since we have people out of work today. We just need to set priorities -- no more road budget, lots of train budget. No more welfare, lots of work. Much less bureaucratic entitlement jobs, much more private industry.

I figure we'll power it with coal/oil/gas/nuke/hydro, with a big shift to wind. It won't be as fast and flexible, but it'll be more efficient, and it will keep us fed.

Besides, there will be enough vestigial US oil for high-value uses (transporting food is high-value, even if there isn't much fertilizer left). Without trucks we won't have 20,000mile salads and South American bananas, but we'll still have corn and wheat.

I think Leanan was talking about nukes, not me, but let's go there. Let's reprocess the waste (forget about proliferation - that cat is out of the bag, just look at Pakistan) and do the Yucca thing for now, and decommission when we have enough wind and solar. This isn't a game with nice-to-haves and wishes, it's survival. Who cares whose back yard it's in, really? Nuke waste is already somewhere, and it's not going away, so 2x or 10x more is just a scaling issue, not a new problem.

I'm not saying I have all the answers, I'm just saying let's get busy and do something that has a decent chance of improving our future. Solar and wind are both decent options, IMHO.

Do you have a better option? Let's hear it. It seems that "we're screwed" is where we started. From there we can do little harm.

Are you suggesting we have an electric train depot behind every wharehouse, department store, grocery store, and restaurant?!

In stages, almost yes.

Every warehouse, almost without exception.

Local deliveries of a half mile to half a dozen miles by electric trucks are quite doable.

Trolley freight, running freight on streetcar tracks outside rush hour has been done, and can be done again.

A freight railroad runs down the middle of 5th Street today across the river in Gretna. Once tracks went through city streets throughout the Warehouse Districts of almost every city.

The speed on transition will depend on many factors, but the USA has made a couple of dramatic transitions in twenty years before.

From 1897 to 1916 the USA built subways in all of their largest cities and streetcars in 500 cities, towns and villages. And from 1950 to 1970, we trashed virtually every price of prime commercial property (called "downtowns") and many well built, established neighborhoods (called "inner cities").

Alan

why not have the rigging mount onto a container that snaps in with the strapdown stuff? I mean those containers are tied together just a little bit of smarts I bet sails could be fitted with little effort and be removable to allow for normal container removal.. Or am I just insane? Vasa comes to mind if I am wrong ;-)

However I do think that it could be done steel is incredibly strong.. Small engine by comparison to hook it all up via hydraulics and it could be manned with little crew. I bet it would work :)

Instead of flying spinnakers downwind you could use giant kite-sails as well. Once you get them up high, the wind is strong.

Were there ever any major ships built with steel masts? The sailing ship of today could vary from the ships of yesteryear as much as the America's Cup boats have. Even massive catamarans could be envisioned to maximize sail area and control.

Plus, with GPS and satellite weather, many of the issues with doldrums and storms could be evaded. Plus, you could always carry bunker fuel for emergencies -- it would just deduct from profit when you had to tap into it.

All to often I've seen JIT turn into NQIT (not quite in time) with more spent for expediting than inventory stocking. For a lot of cargo the inventory carrying cost is not that high. Plus, as mentioned before, globalization is going to decrease so remaining cargo will tend to have more intrinsic value, else it will be replaced by local offerings.

River - I lived aboard in San Rafael in the SF bay for many years. Was the last in the marina with a gas powered gray marine aux. with up draft carb (insert multiple curse words here IRT that carb).

I have several patents around sail power and even marketed through west marine (Wal-Marine)for several years but don't hold that against me.

Take a closer look at the fully battened Junk rig, in particular Colvin designs for shoal draft, bilge keel, steel hull cargo schooners.

IMHO they are the most efficient sail craft on the water.

I can't see how they won't help peak oil and climate change, though such would be just one part of a solution. The elephant in the room is over population, but outside of that renewable energy and sustainable farming seem to me to be key, and cheap electricity will better enable a differentiated technological society.

Again, I'm not saying it's a panacea, and I see myself closer to doom than cornucopia, but I think we owe it to our society (and my children, for me!) to make the crash least-bad.

If a train is headed to a switch, and you can see it's switched the wrong way, thereby heading the train to a disaster, and you don't know now to throw the switch, what do you do? Stand there and watch helplessly, or try to do something to the switch anyway? Until the train is passed, there is still hope.

Maybe the reality is that many of you believe we're past the switch point, while I still think it's worth trying the switch. Heck, even if you throw it as the train is going by you'll wreck the train but some will survive.