MEs & EVs, And The Phantoms Of Cheap Petrol Living as we do with the technological marvels we enjoy on a day-to-day basis that were developed in a very short frame of postwar history, it is easy to miss the fact that many possible avenues of 20th century technological development were not followed up on, and never saw the kind of rapid investment and refinement that computers and medical technology have. The famed German Me-262 was the worlds first operational jet fighter. In its day, it was essentially invincible in the air, so the Allies bombed the bejezzus out of them while they were on the ground. There are some historians that believe the Me-262 could potentially have won the war for the Germans by ensuring control of the skies, but this was precluded largely by Hitler being crazy and insisting on wasting the necessary strategic resources (aluminum, rare earths and fuel) on V2 cruise missiles and utilizing the few Me-262s that were produced as strategic bombers, rather than air superiority fighters, in a spiteful and futile effort to terrorize the British. Less notorious was the Me-163, the worlds first (and only) rocket fighter. The significance of the design faded as developments in jet and rocket technology made it clear that the former was preferable for most aviation purposes, lengthening the historical shadow of the Me-262 at the expense of the Me-163. Yet both Orwell and Huxley, in their postwar dystopian novels, Brave New World and 1984, described the future as belonging to rocket aircraft. At the time they wrote their works, that seemed the more likely scenario. (They correctly foresaw other technological developments, such as the development of cruise missiles, supercarriers, helicopter gunships, automated security systems, social engineering as a practical science, and the development of medical and psychiatric technology beyond the capacity of human culture to manage responsibly). Today it seems pretty much inevitable the ICV is destined to be replaced by some other kind of propulsion system. Natural gas is not a viable solution because while it is in most respects cleaner than gasoline, it is still a limited natural resource and produces enough pollution that it would not be ecologically sustainable as a fuel. It would also be too dangerous in traffic accidents and given the stupidity of too many drivers. So the two prime candidates are EVs and fuel cell vehicles. Both are relatively immature technologies that have been around a long time. The very first EVs were built in the early 20th century; fuel cells have been a popular energy source aboard spacecraft since the 1960s, yet have seen very little development compared to ICV technology, mainly because petrol has historically been so cheap and seemingly limitless, and the environmental externalities are not recaptured by our primitive Capitalist system. The marginal gain in performance that can be expected with a given investment of technological refinement in EVs and FCVs is much greater than in fully mature technologies that may not actually be any older (i.e., ICVs). The first EVs were built during the days of Ford. Ford himself believed the technology would prove superior in time. The first functional hybrid vehicles were the U-Boats, which first left harbor in the 1910s and functioned well enough to be effective under combat conditions in the open seas. Given that WWI happened a century ago, I refuse to believe EV technology cant be refined with our advances in other fields to function well enough to take ordinary people where they want to go. This hasnt happened not because the unexplored promise of the technology is wanting, but because of the basic dysfunction of our Capitalist system. FCVs have an inherent advantage over EVs: they offer more power. Because FCV technology is newer and more tricky than EV technology, there is the inclination to believe that it is the best option. My belief is that FCVs will prove impractical for most applications for the same reason rocket aircraft proved impractical: the sheer difficulty of practical implementation compared to less powerful but more easily deployed technologies. Probably, as with rocket technology, fuel cells will be used in high-performance applications like trucks, trains and construction vehicles. Yet there are other interesting technologies that havent been followed up on either, usually for political reasons, or because of the bias of our system towards instant gratification. Zeppelins, for example. Heavier-than-air aircraft only overtook zeppelins as a means of travel because petrol was cheap, and today, as petrol gets more and more expensive, zeppelins still seem unlikely to make a comeback, because of the power of vested interests and how much easier it is for them to endlessly raise the price of airline tickets and block investment in airship technology and infrastructure. So the deterministic fallacy that is the Capitalist system ensures that zeppelin technology continues to receive less investment and mature less from its original state than jet technology, merely because of the arbitrary variable of cheap petrol and not because of what is or is not possible or practical. It is easy to take cheap petrol as a given and not as an arbitrary variable, then presume all the resulting technological developments as being inherently right and correct. But this is a failure of perspective. In the ancient world, gold was abundant enough that it was used as a common means of exchange, or to build large objects like statues or decals. Over the millennia, crude reprocessing methods and the law of diminishing returns meant that the supply of gold gradually decreased until today it is exorbitantly expensive and can only be used in very small amounts for the most critical applications, and only when cheaper metals like copper or aluminum wont do. Of course if gold were as abundant in the earths crust as silicon, it is easy to imagine that we would prefer gold for many applications for which it is the best choice due to its ductility and density. So the argument that petrol is cheap *now* is sufficient justification to continue our reliance on it is a case study in how Capitalisms faulty premises of scarcity and gratification inevitably lead the system into a self-destructive downward spiral. The folly of wasting available petrol resources on a deterministic basis was probably best captured in the rather crass yet at times insightful To The Stars trilogy of dystopian sci-fi adventure novels in which the protagonists developed ever-more sophisticated technology to retrieve petrol for manufacturing purposes and disdained the folly of prior generations that had simply burned the complex hydrocarbons. This is the crucial weakness in the Capitalist system that its dedicated and mostly ignorant advocates fail to grasp when they blather about supply and demand. They define supply and demand as being the province of a free market, then talk as if markets are exclusive to the Capitalist system or that no one ever bought or sold something before Capitalism was invented in the 18th century. Markets work. Free markets dont. Free markets dont work because they dont exist. Any market necessarily reflects arbitrary conditions in society, the environment and the world as we know it. Markets work to connect buyers with sellers and ensure the efficient distribution of goods and services within a system. In this capacity they work well. But there is no *free* market - no market that is free of the conditions that define life as we know it and are the reason that things like laws and government exist. The free market will no more solve all problems, or any given problem, than a car tire will spontaneously reinflate itself. Rather, the reciprocity between the market and the conditions it operates in, must be continually maintained by an external set of rules. That is why democratic Socialist societies work well and Capitalist societies (or Communist societies, which lack markets) do not. There are other technologies that have undergone little practical development in spite of the possible gains to society and economy due to the dysfunction of the free markets: cybernetics, industrial solar furnaces, space industry, railgun launchers. I will rant about those later...
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 21:05:58 +0000
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