

Africans will learn whichever languages gives them the best economic opportunities. That is still going to be English and will likely be so for a long time. The only realistic challenger will be Mandarin, but not for a long time.


Africans will learn whichever languages gives them the best economic opportunities. That is still going to be English and will likely be so for a long time. The only realistic challenger will be Mandarin, but not for a long time.


Militaries will switch to synthetic fuels or hydrogen. It is already doable, and expansion of production will make it cheap in the future.
You can’t store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can’t be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.
If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.
Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.
The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let’s you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.


You are very outdated on your understanding on fuel cell cars. We already have fuel cell vehicles with > 600km of range. Cost will soon be cheaper than fossil fuels.
You’ll make hydrogen from renewable energy. That is the point.


It’s far cheaper to distribute energy via hydrogen than it is to distribute energy via electricity, especially over long-distance: https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf
We will likely make hydrogen where it is cheap, and then distribute via pipelines or other methods to where it is needed.


BEVs are still cars and create massive traffic problems. Cars are not guaranteed to be faster. We cannot all use cars for all of our transportation needs anyways, so alternatives need to exist regardless.
Humans burns calories all the time, even when resting. And you still need to exercise. Might as well power a real bike instead of a stationary bike. So this is a totally silly thing to worry about.


A cargo bike can go anywhere a normal car can go. An e-bike is many times more efficient than a car. The argument used in favor of EVs over ICEVs also applies to e-bikes over EVs.
I understand that it is a matter of degree. But that means accepting that the BEV is a compromise no matter what their boosters claim otherwise. And there is room for another level of compromise, where people get out of their cars and into something even greener. If people are to stay in their cars, then we might as well stop pretending to care about efficiency.


Many people need a change in lifestyle or livelihood to adapt to BEVs. It is hypocritical to claim that people can’t further adapt to bikes or at least e-bikes.
Cargo bikes exist too. You can carry significant cargo with them.


Millions, sure. But that’s still a niche.
It’s important to note that the car itself is a luxury or extravagance. The most practical form of a car is a bicycle, which most people don’t want. So inevitably, cars always become a way of showing off capacities that you don’t need. Cars with any kind of deficiency get weeded out, simply because they can’t show off those extra capacities. And battery cars have something like that. People will move away from them specifically they can’t do things like crossing the Outback.


I did not say you can’t have battery cars. It is just a limited technology and would likely shrink to a niche market without subsidies.


Round-trip efficiency is not that important. If it really was as important as claimed, we wouldn’t be talking about cars at all. It would all be about bikes, buses, trains, walkable neighborhoods, etc., instead. But in the real world, we will need to accept less-than-perfect solutions. So as long as the idea is green, it should be tolerated.
We also have far more renewable energy available to us than we could ever hope to use. It is orders of magnitude more plentiful than fossil fuel energy. As a result, there will be an overabundance of green energy in the long run. It is fine to use that excess of energy to make stuff e-fuels or hydrogen.


Most of your claims are just climate change denial arguments. Many of them were directly made up by the fossil fuel industry.


Electricity has gotten dramatically more expensive too. It is no panacea. In all likelihood, most of transportation will shift over to either green fuels (e-fuels) or hydrogen. Those are one-to-one replacements for fossil fuels.


They are failing at basic editorial controls. This is not a “pretty good fucking job.” It is a sign of real decline.


It’s one of the stages of enshittification. Unless we see hard changes to avoid further decay, Ars will inevitably get worse and and worse until it does become an “internet rot site.”


It is a huge greenwashing exercise in reality.


Those are outright lies. For one thing, you can use fuel cells instead of gas turbines, getting rid of NOx emissions entirely (not to mention you can filter out NOx even with gas turbines).
Sorry, but this conversation cannot continue if you proceed with dishonest arguments.


If you adopt hydrogen for energy storage, you no longer have to worry about “where.” You have a solution that is nearly geographically independent.
It needs to run on non-AMD hardware too.