Re: Re: Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing
  By: David Higton to Deloptes on Fri Mar 19 2021 08:34 pm

 > Diesel should be banned from the face of the earth.  It has killed
 > thousands of people by pollution (particulates, nitrogen dioxide and
 > carbon monoxide) and continues to do so.
 > 
 > Also, once a diesel, always a diesel - that's the only fuel it can
 > consume during its entire life.
 > 
 > Electric cars kill very few people by pollution, because the pollution
 > that's created today in the power generation process is much diluted
 > before it reaches humans - and as time goes on, more and more
 > electricity is being generated from non-polluting sources, so the
 > pollution is decreasing.  Rapidly.
 > 
 > David

Conbustion engines tend not to produce meaningful ammounts of carbon monoxide
unless they are badly tuned. Carbon monoxide is the signature of bad combustion
and car designers and techniccians go to great lengths to ensure the combustion
is any good.

Your regular coal powered power plant (which is the sort of thing a lot of
countries would use to charge electric cars, if they had them in significative
numbers) is more complex. If they happen to be using a bad source for fuel they
are likely to produce a lot of byproducts like sulphur (in addition to the
regular CO2). Nowadays this is less of a problem because they tune their fuels
more carefully and also process the exhaust smoke so if does not carry as much
bad stuff, but this makes all the deal all the less efficient.

There is a coal power plant not far from here, and they are always testing the
environment for pollutants generated by it, and they always find them. While
the argument can be made that remote power generation is more efficient than
letting everybody use an internal combustion engine, results are not thrilling
either.

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