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Re:Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 22, 2020 @05:30PM (#22658863)
Who says you have to use batteries for everything? For trains you electrify the tracks. For container ships you install a nuclear reactor on the ship the same as a submarine, or burn wood pellets or some other biomass in a steam boiler like the old days. For aircraft you use biofuels, or just buy offsets if that's cheaper (and aircraft are only a small percentage of fossil fuel use).

This doesn't require alien technology, it just requires carbon to be priced so that it isn't artificially cheaper than existing alternatives.

Re:Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down by kube-system on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:02PM (#22659593)
Centrally generated nuclear power with batteries at the point of use is the safest and cleanest tech that we have.

The state of biofuel today leaves a lot to be desired as far as the ability to scale without causing other environmental disasters, and many of them aren't even carbon neutral.

As for nuclear cargo ships -- I'd love to see them, but the liability and political hurdles are insane. You'd probably need a really big carbon tax before we'd see them.

Re:Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down by AnthonyMouse on Sunday March 22, 2020 @10:31PM (#22660738)
Aircraft are only 2% of global CO2 emissions. Generating enough biofuel for just them should be within the realm of possibility.

Even without nuclear, container ships don't have major weight restrictions (they already weigh a hundred thousand tons), so you can fuel them with anything that will catch on fire. Make carbon expensive and they'll just buy whatever is the next cheapest -- sawmill residue, seaweed, whatever. A lot of the difficulty with "biofuels" is the process of making them into oils that can directly replace petroleum in road vehicles, but large ships don't need that. A large furnace like that can burn unprocessed solid biomass.

Re:Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down by kube-system on Monday March 23, 2020 @11:39AM (#22665081)
For that matter, all transportation combined is only 24% of greenhouse gas emissions. Tackling utility energy would be a much larger target, and easier to do. Nuclear power works.

Although, burning biomass in ocean-going vessels is not necessarily a net positive. If, for example, they start burning sawmill scraps which were previously being pressed into Ikea furniture, you're just replacing one carbon emission with another. Biofuels are complicated; you have to be careful not to offset sequestration, as well as being cognizant to other emissions generated both in the process of generation and in burning them. Because of the tangential effects, some biofuels emit more carbon than oil!