by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
“Oh, but we will have electric vehicles instead of the gas powered cars, vans and trucks, etc.” I hear almost everyone say now. Really? I do not think so as the feasibility of this is zero without the power to make them and to charge them and, in addition to that, EVs will never have the power to carry the 35 tons or more of freight on the road, not even 3.5 tons, and as to farm works, electric tractors pulling the plow is not going to happen.
And, even if we could create electric motors capable of doing such jobs there is and remains the problem of the rare earths – and there is good reason why they are called rare earths – that are required for the making of such vehicles, motors and especially the batteries. On top of that comes the problem that those batteries have a lifespan of about 3-5 years at the most, if that long, and then need replacing at costs that are almost have the cost of the vehicles themselves. Does anyone still see this to be the way? I can't. And the same goes for hydrogen fuel cells and all that jazz. Methane, from sewage and such, could work but it all depends on whether manufacturing capacity will still exist to make tractors and other vehicles.
Personally, I cannot see that with lack of fossil fuels (and we all know that nuclear is not an option) the factories will continue to be able to make those cars, trucks and tractors, etc. Either manufacture of those will be done again more or less by hand, thus pushing the prices to such heights that they will become unaffordable, or it just is no longer happening.
If the latter is the case – and even if some will still be made with high prices which will be affordable but too a large minority, if at all – then the horse for transportation and farming will be, once again, the only option. Plus some of the other animals that have, through the ages, been used as draft animals and for carrying goods (and people).
For personal transportation the horse will not be possible for a great many people, especially those that live in towns and cities, but then neither will be the car; at least not in the way that we know them today. The great majority will have to, for their personal transportation, revert back to what we used before the advent of the motor car, namely human power, in the form of walking and cycling.
Even if the electric car and truck will ever make it – though due to lack of power for manufacturing them and their batteries, as well as the rare earths mentioned earlier, I cannot see it happening – the prices will become out of the reach of the majority of those that use a car today.
Farming, as it is being carried out in the main in the so-called developed nations today with the huge machines and the large acreages will also end up being a thing of the past. There is simply no way, with the exception, maybe of using methane, that is to say poo-power, to power tractors, trucks and combines.
So, it will be a return to more people on the land working the land by hand and by use of draft animals, which will, predominately, no doubt, be the horse, who has been our loyal servant in this field (pardon the pun) for centuries and more before the advent of the machines, and this is not all that long ago.
Not so long ago our countryside was a lot more populated than it is today because people worked the land to feed the nation although the more and more mechanization came into agricultural and other rural trades the more people headed for the cities to try their luck there, though many of those were not just agricultural laborers that had lost their jobs due to mechanization but they were smallholders and small farmers who had lost their land, and land to which they had common rights, in the various land grabs of the previous centuries; land grabs by the feudal lords to enlarge their estates.
© 2017
#GreenLiving #oil #horses #endofoil
