Well, those playing Global Polycrisis at "Beginner Level" certainly think so. Meanwhile, Cyclone Gabrielle and the increasing seasonal floods on the South Island would both like a word...

(The megarich also think, post-"The Event," that they can control people via shock collars... As recently spotlighted by Douglas Rushkoff, the megarich are actually fuckwits, and as brutal and inhumane as they are profoundly unwise -- clever, yes, I met so many clever people when I worked in Silicon Valley, good at embracing the zeitgeist, good at making money... but clever is so very different from wise... And the rest of this century is one huge monkey trap...)

To put things in perspective, using a single gallon of gas emits 19.64lbs of CO2 (the weight comes mostly from the oxygen in the air).

Nope. Elroy makes a time machine and that's where the Jetson/Flintstone corssover comes in. In the Birdman episode "Back to the Present" they reveal that the ice caps melted and flooded Earth.

6-7 miles in typical car, or 15 miles in yaris hybrid

If they learn from it and can transfer it to other uses it is a step forward. Cracks me up how many people dont understand research and learning. They are not building a production car they are trying new and different things to find out what works and what doesn't. In new idea developement you try things tthat are not the norm so you can push technology forward.

Electric is great, but I still believe we need hydrogen cars. It provides us with 2 benefits. One, it is split cleanly to make electricity. The other is that it also has water as a byproduct. And with the push to end fossil fuel use for cars, we could convert gas stations into hydrogen stations, with another added benefit. A tank could be added to hydrogen cars to collect the water produced. When you go to a hydrogen station to refuel, you can pump out the water in the same action to be collected by the station, and sent back into the public water system adding back some of our water we will be losing through climate change.

For a super efficient car your math seems about right. A gallon (~4L) of gasoline is roughly 33kW/h of energy, so 100-120 miles per gallon equivalent car is possible, but difficult (sorry for US units, that's how we measure car efficiency).

It may be good as a supplement like you said, or can possibly keep the AC running or something like that.

My midsized suv gets 28 mpg on average

Just a reminder to the downers in here: advancement starts with the least effective, worst version of a thing. But from that start you learn a bunch and make the next version, which is better.

This is neat. Is it a functional solution to carbon capture? No, or rather not yet. But it’s smart kids stepping up to fight in the right direction.

Some of y’all would have stood on the beaches of Kitty Hawk and said, “All that to go less than a hundred feet? I’ll stick with my HORSE thank you very much!”

Go get ‘em kids. You’re going to save the world. You have to. The rest of us are going to be shit talking you from our couches on Reddit apparently.

Yes, there will be no-code/low-code solutions increasing, but they will be cookie-cutter applications like the website builders (wix, etc.). Yet, specialized applications will always need programmers

The following submission statement was provided by /u/filosoful:

The continued global rise in sales of SUVs pushed their climate-heating emissions to almost 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

The 330 million sport utility vehicles on the roads produced emissions equivalent to the combined national emissions of the UK and Germany last year. If SUVs were a country, they would rank as the sixth most polluting in the world.

Climate campaigners are increasingly concerned about the impact of SUVs. The vehicles are larger and heavier than regular cars and use on average 20% more fuel. The increased number of SUVs in 2022 were responsible for a third of the increase in global oil demand.

Purchases of SUVs have soared in recent years, rising from 20% of new cars in 2012 to 46% of all cars last year, the IEA reports. The rise continued in 2022, includes significant growth in the US, India and Europe, despite the overall number of cars sold falling slightly.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11mvvym/suvs_emitted_more_carbon_dioxide_last_year_than/jbjvycz/

Because we are a strong democracy, worse we could possibly get is a slightly authoritarian democracy, so basically just a slightly worse Trump.

Yeah I’m not sure physics allow us to live modern lives and actually improve the planet back to a pre-human state. Or even close to it. Can we slow down our trashing of the planet? Absolutely. But there’s no way we can reverse course by engineering our way out of it.

I feel like you're mistaking my conversation as an argument so I'm gonna stop here. Congrats on winning the argument.

Why can't America have a "fascist" government?

Agreed.

Objectively almost every metric is better. Some significantly better.

Subjective fear mongering attracts views and clicks though. We all need to be cognizant of that fact.

Thinking about the maths of it, I reckon a car with current level solar panels built into the roof would be a serious suppliment to the energy required.

I'm in the north of England and the 2.5kW, suboptimal panels on my roof generate about 15kWh on a sunny day.

Going by the size of the panel, I reckon at leat 1kW of capacity could be embedded on the average car roof, boot and bonet.

So a sunny day would then provide 5-6kW. So that's like 15-20 miles of driving?

Obviously the car would need external energy for the most part, but I don't think that's an insignificant amount of energy. And considering a concern for electric cars is still range and availability of charge points, knowing that you can get free mileage just by parking in an unshaded location for a few hours would be a big selling point to me.

I imagine the electrics of it are the most difficult part though.

It was made by undergrads. Calm down.

It’s actually not the first of its kind: https://youtu.be/M4g4WBo-5fc

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First, America can't have a "fascist" government, and a party like the Republicans are typical in all but Western Europe. Second, any left wing revolt against a right wing government would hardly get off the ground, because the military will just side with whoever is president currently.

The problem is that moving a big thing fast and for long distances is energy intensive. So solar power is just not enough if you are expecting it to be self contained on a personal vehicle.

More to your point though, photosynthesis is an energy capture mechanism. In order to derive mechanical energy from the molecules produced (sugar and oxygen) the car would then need to react the sugar with oxygen. So in effect, you'd just be making a bad solar panel with extra steps.

I'm less concerned for a civil war akin to the one in our past between two formal states and armies, and instead more concerned about increased political violence and domestic terror groups. We already have severe issues with mass shootings and have seen increases in politically motivated attacks (e.g. Jan 6, the attack on the Pelosis, attacks on LGBTQ+ venues, etc.) and, what I find especially worrying, a lack of serious criticism and opposition from our politicians. Republicans often ignore or even justify many of these attacks (as by and large most are perpetrated by right-wing actors), such as with them making fun of the attack on the Pelosis and making up a conspiracy theory about it being a homosexual affair, and while Democrats have criticized these attacks, little is done to actual go after the political agitators causing them. Moreover, wider language regarding political violence has also become more extremist as at a recent CPAC, a prominent conservative (I believe it was Michael Knowles) went on stage and called for the "eradication" of the transgender community and has since defended himself by arguing he can't genocide transgender "people" if they aren't actually a group of people. This has come with little-to-no opposition from conservatives despite this language dehumanizing and practically calling for violence against transgender people.

Yeah, doesn't an ICE exhaust that in like 30 miles?

This whole thread is ridiculously anti-innovation.

These posters would have stopped building computers with the TRS-80 because it wasn’t advanced enough, and there was no chance that anyone anywhere could improve the concept over time.