I support these proposals and hope that the billionaires get on them. But it's important to remember that not all, not even most, energy usage in the United States occurs in the residential or transportation sectors (much less if we only consider energy usage for consumer transportation like cars, which improved public transit would seek to reduce). By focusing on the obvious areas of waste to us as consumers we may miss things which we don't encounter day-to-day but are much bigger issues. For instance, although 600 millions gallons of gas used for lawn mowing sounds like a lot, it is equivalent to only about 14 million barrels of oil or only 0.2% of total petroleum consumption (although I'm sure that the water used on lawns is somewhat more significant). In contrast, the trucking industry uses about 1.3 billion barrels of oil annually or nearly 18% of total petroleum consumption, so reducing the petroleum consumption of trucking by even 1.5% (perhaps by minimally re-localizing production to decrease transportation distance, slightly improving the fuel economy of freight trucks, etc) would reduce overall consumption by more than the total elimination of gas lawn mowers, which I'm sure would have a much more pronounced impact on day-to-day life and would therefore require a lot more work to achieve. I know you were "pitching" ideas to billionaires and their followers, who tend to focus on consumer-level responses to the environmental crisis, but it is important to keep the bigger picture in mind. www.eia.gov/consumption/ www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=33&t=6 www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Energy.aspx
Solar hot water is tough to justify economically where cheap natural gas is available. very poor roi. this may change if natural gas price increases. A lot of this stuff like insulating/sealing homes is much easier said than done - if done wrong, can create a lot of problems. You're wrong about geothermal. It does not just use a fan, geothermal uses a compressor and pump, and the former draws a lot of current. They do not pump air into the home, they use refrigeration to move heat between the circulating ground loop fluid and the indoor air.The ground is still colder than room temperature in winter, so it's not a direct heat exchanger. In summer, the ground isn't cold enough for the fluid to cool a house either. They work the same way as air source heatpumps and a/c units, only more efficient due to ground temp being closer to the home's temp, so a lower compression ratio is needed to move the same amount of heat. Plus the ground temp is constant, so don't need expensive supplemental heat. (noting - there's a new generation of air source heatpumps that can maintain full capacity at low outdoor temps but cost a lot less to install than geothermal) Heatpumps have what's called a coefficient of performance, energy input vs energy output. If the power comes from a fossil fuel power plant (gas is the only type being built now - wind/solar can't run heatpumps), need a cop of 3 to just break even with a high efficiency gas furnace. Power plants are inefficient. Would need a cop of 4 or 5 to make it worth while, have to put down tens of thousands of dollars. Geothermal heatpumps need about twice as much airflow as furnaces to provide the same amount of heat. Most homes don't have large enough ducts for a heatpump capable of supplying all the heat a house needs. Heck, many don't even have large enough ducts for modern furnaces. A lot of the solutions you propose may sound simple at first, but are complex and very costly to implement and yield very modest savings.
Everything is already here. Let’s not “improve” life anymore with our plastic technology. Instead let’s change the psychology about what we already have: let the grass grow - it looks better, no cars or better transportation, no need to go anywhere - everyone will work from home in a few years, delivery and shopping done online, no hot water- cold is healthier, no need to go to mars when most humans don’t even know Earth, etc... let’s not be consumers basically, we create the rich people that feed us with their toxic products and play with our psyche.
So... can you tell me your space company's name? O wait, you doesn't owe one. Why the hell do you think yourself smarter than Elon Musk? If you have a great idea, just make a company or a non profit organization, or whatever you want, and make something which will change the world as you would expect. After then, let's see the results. Elon already showed his talent many times. Can you upload or link one of your videos, where we can see your product or something?
"If you have a great idea, just make a company or a non profit organization, or whatever you want, and make something which will change the world as you would expect." This is such an incredibly ignorant statement and I would expect no less from a Musk fanboy. Where do you think Musk got the money to start his companies? His parents owned an emerald mine in South Africa. His parents gave him $28k to start paypal. Do (did) your parents have that kind of cash sitting around for you to start a business? Mine did not and I come from a pretty comfortable background. Saying, 'why don't you start a company' is in no way a rebuttal of the points made in my video. I don't think you are capable of doing that. But if I had the kind of wealth that Musk was born into I think I could do better. Have you ever actually tried to start a company, or do you just kneel to people who do? I have seen first hand that connections and money often mean a lot more than good ideas. Have a bad idea but you went to Stanford for a semester or know somebody who did: funding. Well thought out idea, but you don't know the right people or have any funding, good luck. How has Musk showed his talent in creating things? Sending rockets into space? I'm pretty sure people were doing that before he came around and I'm pretty sure most of the work gets done by his engineers not him. His electric car company that is bleeding money and can't come anywhere close to making deadlines? His solar company that was doing so poorly despite government assistance that he had to have Tesla buy it? His other ideas that are not yet proven to work? He created a useful piece of software in paypal, but that is a far cry from creating things in the real world. All Musk has proven is that he can get the government to subsidize his business and that he can get a lot of investors and fanboys to buy into them. You have no argument. Just an irrational attachment to a man who promises things he can't deliver. I actually just founded a company. It is called DEEZ. If you would like to see a link to it I can show you.
@@NeverSpeakInAbsolutes Greg, you are so funny. All-in-all, I totally agree with your entire post, but that last part was funny and somewhat unexpected. For a moment there, I thought that you were talking about the book company you owned.
your information seems to be quite a bit out of date you are mostly talking "This Old House" level of implementations, stuff that is already being taken up for new home construction/by the construction industry, "This Old House" has been talking about plentiful insulation and heat pumps for a couple years, also have you not heard of the solar panel tiles from sun city/tesla? and power walls, that is mostly a direct equivalent to the solar water heating but it is able to be more utilized for the whole house Elon's/boring company tunnels "loops" aren't going to be vacuumed at all, and it(making large tunnels) is stuff cities already do but at a much bigger price tag, also Elon already said the focus of loops has been switched to mass transit for peds/cyclists and then cars your one point about lawn mowers is true that it is wasteful, but the one issue I see with electric lawnmowers is the companies that make electric lawnmowers make them look like freaking plastic vacuum cleaners, no man is going to buy that, it has to look industrial or machine like also no mow grass/yard is probably a good idea, but again it is unlikely everyone it going to be able to choose an option like that, so unfortunately mowing will still need to be done, so i think we really need better implemented electric mowers even autonomous ones(even though they exist already and are a relatively easy problem to solve)
Newer does not necessarily equal better. There is nothing wrong about my information because I'm talking about older technologies. "solar panel tiles from sun city/tesla? and power walls, that is mostly a direct equivalent to the solar water heating but it is able to be more utilized for the whole house" Your information is just plain wrong. First, solar water heat is a different technology than photovoltaic. If your heating water, you would do better to do it with a solar water heater instead of converting sunlight into electricity and then into heat. With a solar heating system it goes right to heat with less loss in conversion. More efficient. Even more efficient when you compare the manufacturing processes of each. From a Hyperloop website. It is not a near vacuum, but it is not just a standard underground tunnel. "Passengers or cargo are loaded into the hyperloop vehicle and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube." Not once did I mention electric lawn mowers in my video. I think it makes sense to move away from mowers altogether as much as possible. I use one of those vacuum cleaner deals when it gets too hot, but let some guy who sits on his riding mower question my masculinity when I have the old school reel push mower the rest of the year while he sits on his ass. I'm thinking about getting a scythe and a grass hook. I saw some autonomous mowers last year at the country fair and I laughed. We need to find ways to do things with less machines no more. I should probably do a video on systems theory and how people don't see the energy that goes into the entire life cycle of a technology. They just see the technology. In the meantime check out this comic on energy slaves. www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/#page-1
We can't expect the wealthy to save us. We will have to save ourselves.
Unless we eat them... 😉
easier idea: let the grass grow. it looks better long anyway.
I support these proposals and hope that the billionaires get on them. But it's important to remember that not all, not even most, energy usage in the United States occurs in the residential or transportation sectors (much less if we only consider energy usage for consumer transportation like cars, which improved public transit would seek to reduce). By focusing on the obvious areas of waste to us as consumers we may miss things which we don't encounter day-to-day but are much bigger issues. For instance, although 600 millions gallons of gas used for lawn mowing sounds like a lot, it is equivalent to only about 14 million barrels of oil or only 0.2% of total petroleum consumption (although I'm sure that the water used on lawns is somewhat more significant). In contrast, the trucking industry uses about 1.3 billion barrels of oil annually or nearly 18% of total petroleum consumption, so reducing the petroleum consumption of trucking by even 1.5% (perhaps by minimally re-localizing production to decrease transportation distance, slightly improving the fuel economy of freight trucks, etc) would reduce overall consumption by more than the total elimination of gas lawn mowers, which I'm sure would have a much more pronounced impact on day-to-day life and would therefore require a lot more work to achieve. I know you were "pitching" ideas to billionaires and their followers, who tend to focus on consumer-level responses to the environmental crisis, but it is important to keep the bigger picture in mind.
www.eia.gov/consumption/
www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=33&t=6
www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Energy.aspx
I think space colonization is a good idea. Not commercial spaceflight, at all, but otherwise...
Space colonization is utter nonsense. By the time it's even technically possible, it will be unnecessary anyway.
Solar hot water is tough to justify economically where cheap natural gas is available. very poor roi. this may change if natural gas price increases.
A lot of this stuff like insulating/sealing homes is much easier said than done - if done wrong, can create a lot of problems.
You're wrong about geothermal. It does not just use a fan, geothermal uses a compressor and pump, and the former draws a lot of current. They do not pump air into the home, they use refrigeration to move heat between the circulating ground loop fluid and the indoor air.The ground is still colder than room temperature in winter, so it's not a direct heat exchanger. In summer, the ground isn't cold enough for the fluid to cool a house either. They work the same way as air source heatpumps and a/c units, only more efficient due to ground temp being closer to the home's temp, so a lower compression ratio is needed to move the same amount of heat. Plus the ground temp is constant, so don't need expensive supplemental heat. (noting - there's a new generation of air source heatpumps that can maintain full capacity at low outdoor temps but cost a lot less to install than geothermal)
Heatpumps have what's called a coefficient of performance, energy input vs energy output. If the power comes from a fossil fuel power plant (gas is the only type being built now - wind/solar can't run heatpumps), need a cop of 3 to just break even with a high efficiency gas furnace. Power plants are inefficient. Would need a cop of 4 or 5 to make it worth while, have to put down tens of thousands of dollars.
Geothermal heatpumps need about twice as much airflow as furnaces to provide the same amount of heat. Most homes don't have large enough ducts for a heatpump capable of supplying all the heat a house needs. Heck, many don't even have large enough ducts for modern furnaces.
A lot of the solutions you propose may sound simple at first, but are complex and very costly to implement and yield very modest savings.
You don't understand Elon Musk's genius ;)
Everything is already here. Let’s not “improve” life anymore with our plastic technology. Instead let’s change the psychology about what we already have: let the grass grow - it looks better, no cars or better transportation, no need to go anywhere - everyone will work from home in a few years, delivery and shopping done online, no hot water- cold is healthier, no need to go to mars when most humans don’t even know Earth, etc... let’s not be consumers basically, we create the rich people that feed us with their toxic products and play with our psyche.
Nonsense
So... can you tell me your space company's name? O wait, you doesn't owe one. Why the hell do you think yourself smarter than Elon Musk? If you have a great idea, just make a company or a non profit organization, or whatever you want, and make something which will change the world as you would expect. After then, let's see the results. Elon already showed his talent many times. Can you upload or link one of your videos, where we can see your product or something?
"If you have a great idea, just make a company or a non profit organization, or whatever you want, and make something which will change the world as you would expect."
This is such an incredibly ignorant statement and I would expect no less from a Musk fanboy. Where do you think Musk got the money to start his companies? His parents owned an emerald mine in South Africa. His parents gave him $28k to start paypal. Do (did) your parents have that kind of cash sitting around for you to start a business? Mine did not and I come from a pretty comfortable background.
Saying, 'why don't you start a company' is in no way a rebuttal of the points made in my video. I don't think you are capable of doing that. But if I had the kind of wealth that Musk was born into I think I could do better. Have you ever actually tried to start a company, or do you just kneel to people who do? I have seen first hand that connections and money often mean a lot more than good ideas. Have a bad idea but you went to Stanford for a semester or know somebody who did: funding. Well thought out idea, but you don't know the right people or have any funding, good luck.
How has Musk showed his talent in creating things? Sending rockets into space? I'm pretty sure people were doing that before he came around and I'm pretty sure most of the work gets done by his engineers not him. His electric car company that is bleeding money and can't come anywhere close to making deadlines? His solar company that was doing so poorly despite government assistance that he had to have Tesla buy it? His other ideas that are not yet proven to work? He created a useful piece of software in paypal, but that is a far cry from creating things in the real world.
All Musk has proven is that he can get the government to subsidize his business and that he can get a lot of investors and fanboys to buy into them. You have no argument. Just an irrational attachment to a man who promises things he can't deliver.
I actually just founded a company. It is called DEEZ. If you would like to see a link to it I can show you.
@@NeverSpeakInAbsolutes Greg, you are so funny. All-in-all, I totally agree with your entire post, but that last part was funny and somewhat unexpected. For a moment there, I thought that you were talking about the book company you owned.
You are making the assumption that having a space company is automatically a positive.
@@NeverSpeakInAbsolutes man these peeps are FRAGILE....
Dont go after their boy. Lol
2:21 I'm a billionaire...
In my mind!
nonsense
your information seems to be quite a bit out of date
you are mostly talking "This Old House" level of implementations, stuff that is already being taken up for new home construction/by the construction industry, "This Old House" has been talking about plentiful insulation and heat pumps for a couple years, also have you not heard of the solar panel tiles from sun city/tesla? and power walls, that is mostly a direct equivalent to the solar water heating but it is able to be more utilized for the whole house
Elon's/boring company tunnels "loops" aren't going to be vacuumed at all, and it(making large tunnels) is stuff cities already do but at a much bigger price tag, also Elon already said the focus of loops has been switched to mass transit for peds/cyclists and then cars
your one point about lawn mowers is true that it is wasteful, but the one issue I see with electric lawnmowers is the companies that make electric lawnmowers make them look like freaking plastic vacuum cleaners, no man is going to buy that, it has to look industrial or machine like
also no mow grass/yard is probably a good idea, but again it is unlikely everyone it going to be able to choose an option like that, so unfortunately mowing will still need to be done, so i think we really need better implemented electric mowers even autonomous ones(even though they exist already and are a relatively easy problem to solve)
Newer does not necessarily equal better. There is nothing wrong about my information because I'm talking about older technologies.
"solar panel tiles from sun city/tesla? and power walls, that is mostly a direct equivalent to the solar water heating but it is able to be more utilized for the whole house"
Your information is just plain wrong. First, solar water heat is a different technology than photovoltaic. If your heating water, you would do better to do it with a solar water heater instead of converting sunlight into electricity and then into heat. With a solar heating system it goes right to heat with less loss in conversion. More efficient. Even more efficient when you compare the manufacturing processes of each.
From a Hyperloop website. It is not a near vacuum, but it is not just a standard underground tunnel.
"Passengers or cargo are loaded into the hyperloop vehicle and accelerate gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube."
Not once did I mention electric lawn mowers in my video. I think it makes sense to move away from mowers altogether as much as possible. I use one of those vacuum cleaner deals when it gets too hot, but let some guy who sits on his riding mower question my masculinity when I have the old school reel push mower the rest of the year while he sits on his ass. I'm thinking about getting a scythe and a grass hook.
I saw some autonomous mowers last year at the country fair and I laughed. We need to find ways to do things with less machines no more.
I should probably do a video on systems theory and how people don't see the energy that goes into the entire life cycle of a technology. They just see the technology.
In the meantime check out this comic on energy slaves. www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/#page-1