So far "How Solar Energy Became Cheap" and "Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon" by @solar_chase both kind of remind me of The Box, a history of how containerized shipping took over the world.
Solar PV and containerization have both been weirdly capitalist triumphs and investor catastrophes. Ultimately brutally competitive, low-margin industries littered with bankruptcies, even as they transform the world and enable other kinds of economic development.
Has anybody made a world map where distance is proportional to the energy required to move a given mass of cargo between two points?
It's hard to get across to people just how energy efficient container and bulk carrier ships are. Energetically every port is kind of right next door to every other port, even if physically they're on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean.
The catastrophe here in the last mile is due to the fact that with cargo transportation, the majority of the mass being moved is generally the cargo. But in cars, it's just a few %. Even if you do a massive Costco run and get 100kg of stuff, it's still only going to be like 5-10% of the mass of the vehicle.
In contrast, an Urban Arrow electric cargo bike weighs 50kg and can carry 250kg:
@chaspinrad@ZaneSelvans similar math for food. If you’re driving an SUV to the grocery and then buying local for carbon reasons, you’re getting it all wrong.
@luis_in_brief@chaspinrad I've seen similarly disturbing calculations done for "local" produce at farmers markets. Growers from a pretty big area are often driving relatively cargo-inefficient trucks a couple hundred km every day to hit various different markets, and blowing up the energy/emissions intensity of the produce as a result.
@ZaneSelvans@chaspinrad yup. There often are other decent reasons to want to buy local food (big ag really does suck in a lot of ways!) but carbon intensity ain’t it!
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