Last week, in my quest to see whether British Columbia could become a 100 per cent renewable energy region, I looked at personal transportation. This week I take on the far more challenging task of long-distance trucking, boats, ferries and planes.
Ponder this: a typical eighteen-wheeler truck has a 400-horse-power engine. It burns stored solar energy from ancient, 300-million-year-old marine organisms. If you used horses to pull that much load, you’d need 400 of them, and 400 hectares of land to keep the horses pastured.
Which is Better: Slaves, Horses or Fossil Fuels?
Alternatively, you could use 4,000 humans—and a hundred overseers (Read more…)