TJ, it's important to start at the beginning of chains of causal effect. Diesel engines require catalytic converters in their exhaust systems not because the exhaust is dirty but because the tax systems favour using diesel fuel instead of clean-burning gasoline and other energizing systems.
It's silly to create a tax system which makes people choose diesel engines for little cars, then require them to use some of the savings to pay for platinum to clean up the resulting mess and which doesn't clean up the CO2 which is emitted in greater quantity from diesel engines than those powered by electricity from mains supply, power stations being MUCH more efficient, even with line losses taken into account, than internal combustion engines in little cars.
Diesel fuel/kerosene should be used in long haul intercity megatrucks, railways, ships/boats and airliners. Hydrogen rich hydrocarbons should be used in little vehicles around town.
Big trucks in rural settings don't need platinum in their exhaust systems. Vehicles used in cities do need clean exhausts. The cheapest solution to pollution is dilution. When dilution isn't enough, then technological/economic means are needed to maintain the commons in good condition.
The easiest thing to do is get the rules right meaning don't create tax incentives which result in pollution.
Having dealt with the EU Environment Commission, albeit 20 years ago [I doubt they have changed - heck, it's probably the same people enjoying their sinecure], they do not use intelligence as their primary driving force, so they will no doubt do as usual for governments and make things worse and more expensive rather than fix them up sensibly.
Platinum is not needed in either diesel engines or petrol engines [other than maybe a few vehicles for some reason]. Vehicle emission regulations should be set so that lower cost technology than platinum catalysts can do the job. Setting extreme regulatory limits for petrol engines, then allowing other pollution sources such as fires in houses and dirty diesels to do 1000 times the amount of pollution is silly.
I am not surprised if the EU "solves" the problem by forcing people to also use catalytic converters on diesel engines.
You do seem to have a good grasp of financial relativity theory: <recommendation: travel back in time and accumulate platinum, or accumulate something else now - meaning, grab financial parachute now, or free flight economic gravity well later, when massless monetary quantum particles, in waves, get bent and sucked into the black hole that will be Ben BurnAndKaput's secret schema, never to emerge, to be reset in the birth of the new galaxy, on the other side of the dark interregnum >
We do not seem to have escape velocity but do seem to be approaching an event horizon. But I wonder if everyone paddles in the same direction, whether we can maintain velocity and maintain altitude and maybe even gain altitude. Unfortunately, people are just as likely to paddle in the wrong direction, thereby accelerating the orbital degradation. Governments especially are prone to take such incorrect action because they are dealing with OPM.
Like your imaginings of the change in business character of the H One in One IFC Hong Kong, I have sometimes sat on one of the local extinct volcanoes around the city looking at the vast carpeting of suburbs, wondering what they will look like in 10, 100 or 1000 years. Maoris used to live on the volcanoes but now there are just forms in the ground where they had kumara pits, had fortifications and huts. Like Angkor Wat, the royal courts of the pyramids of Egypt, Xian's terracotta military, Stonehenge, there is nothing left but some archeological curiosities.
The carpet of suburbs will no doubt be replaced, abandoned or destroyed too.
Economic collapse seems to be a successful way for communities to end. We now have a global community in a world-record real-time 3D 6 billion person experiment, so it's not like when some Maori tribe fell on hard times or defeat and nobody else on Earth knew anything about it. There is potential for Biblical lessons to be learned. History has never yet stopped, so I am not convinced it has done so yet.
Montana and various mountains have always had a quorum of doomsters waiting for economic collapse if not The Rapture. But it has not yet come and their cans of baked beans will be rusting and some of the people will have died waiting.
There does seem to be quite a credit/liquidity/derivative/counter-party/leveraged crunch going on. I'm not yet convinced it's of Biblical proportions.
Platinum for catalytic converters will NOT be an issue if Biblical lessons are to be learned.
Mqurice |
