Diesel cars

I often wonder if when most cars go all electric, they’ll start including a gallon or two diesel tanks that you might fill once or twice a year, like your windshield washer fluid. Sounds odd that you would need to add diesel to a plug-in electric vehicle but actually makes a lot of sense when you consider the laws of thermodynamics – virtually all electric buses carry a small 5 gallon diesel tank to run the diesel heaters.

An all electric car in cold climates would have much longer range if it relied on a small, efficient diesel heater to provide warmth to the batteries when starting, heat the interior and provide defrost. Diesel is widely used to heat homes – although we call untaxed diesel – heating oil.

While it’s true that an electric car that burns diesel for heat isn’t 100% carbon free, adding a diesel heater to electric cars could reduce carbon emissions by reducing required battery sizes and electricity consumption due to cold battery losses. Diesel heater consumption in an all electric car would be tiny compared to fossil automobiles – as your just heating not moving the car with diesel.

Electric cars could also contain a reversing valve in the air conditioning system to pump heat into the car in cold weather – and that’s more efficient than resistance heating. The problem with heat pumps in a car is you are limited in where you can pump heat from on a cold day – even a large radiator and very high refrigerant compression might not be sufficient to raise temperatures sufficiently without generating heat from the electricity which is very energy intensive. Maybe you can recover waste heat from the motors and battery but there is less than you might think – and as electric cars improve waste heat will only decline.

So I’m thinking low sulfur diesel might be the way to go for heating electric cars in cold climates.

Dear farm kids . . .

Dear farm kids . . .

I grew up on a first-generation dairy farm, and some days, I hated it. I hated that sometimes the cows got out, and I was late to school because we had to put them away. I hated the jokes that kids made about me smelling like manure or wearing boots that actually had mud on them. I didn’t always want to spend my evenings in the barn, feeding calves or helping milk.

My parents were often too busy to go to all of my games and events. We rarely went on vacation. I didn’t understand why people would tell me that growing up on a farm was a blessing. I hated waiting for chores to be done before opening presents at Christmas time and that we had to leave family events early to do chores. I didn’t understand why my friends always wanted to see the cows when they came over instead of hanging out in the house. Overall, I wasn’t always proud to be a farm kid.

Looking back, getting to grow up as a farm kid was one of the best things that my parents did for me. I loved being able to have animals like horses, donkeys, sheep, alpacas, and goats along with our cows, and I loved naming the baby calves and watching them grow up. I just didn’t understand that even all the things that I didn’t like about growing up on a farm at the time would both help me later in life, and those would be the things that I miss the most when I’m away.

Changes

Sometimes the changes frighten me, but I’m deeply comforted by the fact that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

NPR

Trump Election Lawsuits Filed So Far : NPR

"Our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated," Trump said in a statement Saturday. "The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots."

The problem is, Trump's campaign has spent much of the past week in court with little success and without presenting anything close to evidence that points to a fraudulent result.

"You can't go to court just because you don't like the vote totals," Ohio State election law professor Ned Foley said on MSNBC over the weekend. "You have to have a legal claim, and you have to have evidence to back it up. And that's just not there."