...can learn to live without our atmosphere.
My feeling about cars is not based on what Americans want. I'm quite sure they want cars.
So do Chinese apparently. I've heard from my Chinese friends that traffic is terrible in Beijing, for example.
My unrealistic assumption that we will have no choice but to do away with cars is based on physics, not desire.
When I lived in California, I came to understand that the State Legislature wanted to do away with the 2nd law of Thermodynamics "by 2000" - this was back in the 1980's. I'm used to "by such and such a date" rhetoric, and am now old enough to see the consequences of shifting things to future generations. It's the source of some of my ridicule which many people find unpleasant.
The Chinese want cars; the Indians want cars, the French want to keep their cars as do the Germans, the Spanish, the Canadians...
The per capita consumption of energy in the United States corresponds in terms of average continuous power - more familiar than units of joules to most people - works out to about 10,000 Watts, about ten times as large as the average Chinese the last time I looked, which may have been a few years back, since I last did the calculation. The per capita power consumption of the average citizen of the planet is on the order of 2500 watts, about 1/4 of an American.
We have a racist President who is now in the process of normalizing Auschwitz type behavior with respect to Children. I'm not sure how long the world will tolerate the exceptional treatment given to Americans, but Americans may find out some new things in the next ten years or so. I don't know, but we may find out that Americans will not always get what they want.
If everyone on the planet lived like Americans do today, and many people want to do so, we'd be talking in terms of zetajoules, not exajoules of annual energy consumption. We're consuming on this planet, as of 2016 according to the WEO figures, 576 exajoules. If everyone was an American, we'd be at over 2500 exajoules.
Everybody wants that apparently, and although I'm very much a voice in the (shrinking) wilderness, I don't.
The more we consume now, the more impoverished our children and grandchildren will be.
Whenever I think about "cost" - money trumps everything apparently - I include "external costs," the costs to the environment and the future of humanity and all living things. I personally believe that if we included the external cost of gasoline it might be well over $10.00/gallon.
Current Americans are definitely not willing to pay for the future. They are a people who rip children from their parents and lose them to clearly incompetent corrupt bureaucrats. They hate children. Everything they do says as much. They apparently hate their own children as much as they hate latin children when you consider what they're leaving to future generations because they love cars.
DME is a wonder fuel. I believe, although I'm certainly not competent to be certain, that it might make certain kinds of what might be "essential" self propelled vehicles. The cost of having a DME powered world would be the cost of building new infrastructure; the cost of having clean DME would be the cost of building new nuclear infrastructure. To do this, we'd have to love our children and be willing to pay for them, as my parents were willing to pay for me.
I don't think we are. We clearly hate children more than ever, and love our cars more than ever as well. (I never get as much interest in my writings as when I attack the idiotic and obscene Tesla car.)
What that's worth in dollars and cents immediately, loving our children more than our cars, I cannot say. Many years ago I commented elsewhere on the difference between "want" and "need."
Should Nuclear Energy Be a Panacea? (The links can be more readily be seen at the Daily Kos version; on this version you have to move the cursor over the text to see them, but I like this version better because of the painting.)
As for the external cost free cost of DME...
You may be able to find out about what you may consider more "realistic" costs of DME by perusing the website of the International DME Association.
Unlike me, they may think it's OK to make DME from gas and coal. I don't agree.
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