Polycar: A DOABLE way to ease the energy crisis

[jmowreader]

DU loves to debate about alternative fuel vehicles. Every time someone finds some sort of alternative-fuel or flexfuel vehicle online, half of us start writing out checks for a deposit on one, and the other half figure out why the thing won't work.

This will.

Let's call it Polycar. Poly means "many," and you will see why in a second.

These things we must all agree on:

1. The United States is a nation of automobile drivers. Human-powered and animal-powered vehicles have their place, but a solution that will work must include cars.
2. Mass transit, whether buses or light rail, is important--but the United States is designed so that you really need a car. Once again, a solution that will work must include cars.
3. Most people will do well with a car about the size of a Honda Accord for 90 percent of their driving. The American highway is full of small trucks. You need one maybe ten percent of the time...but you drive around with an empty bed 90 percent of the time because you can't afford two cars.
4. People like to own things--especially cars. Any solution that doesn't allow people to own the cars in it won't work.

This isn't fleshed out, as you'll soon see. It's a conceptual framework. Polycar is a combination of individual ownership and shared service.

Phase 1:
To enter the Polycar realm, you first purchase a Polycar. This can be any diesel-powered compact or midsize car. It can even be cars that are already on the market. However, you buy it from the Polycar bank for payments about $75 per month higher than a regular bank would charge--if First National Bank is charging $225 per month, Polycar is charging $300. The length of the Polycar contract is 48 months.

At maturity, you've got two choices: continue to pay the $300 per month (see below) and get a different car, or drop out of Polycar and keep what you have. It's your car. We want the cars back at 48 months so we can make a little money by selling them. and a new car will pollute less than an old one. (Below: since you're trading in your Polycar at the four years, if you apply the trade-in value to your new contract you'll pay less than $300/month for subsequent cars.)

The extra $75 per month is to finance the juicy part of Polycar: prepaid rental. Polycar owns a fleet of Sprinters, both van and pickup styles. Polycar owners have a Sprinter key as well as the key to their own car. Sprinters have Vehicle Antitheft System, which is a key with a chip in it. Your chip will tell the computer your membership status with Polycar--if you're paid up, the truck cranks and you're on your own.

Phase 2:
Diesel-electric hybrids.

Phase 3:
This one requires a lot of Democrats, for it involves legalizing pot so you'll have a good oilseed crop.

It's late, but I think it's doable.

[Ian David]

1. So, your solution is to get banks to finance stoned Zipcar drivers? n/t

[jmowreader]

14. Not zipcars...real cars

Look at the original post: any compact or midsize car with a diesel engine in it can be a Polycar.

Diesels will be used in the program for two reasons: if you're going to use biofuel, and obviously we are, the process for converting oil into biodiesel (transesterification) is much more efficient than the process for converting biomatter into alcohol (distilliation). That's one. Just as important is the fact that all the trucks in the program are diesels. If you're trying to start a cold diesel, you turn on a set of glow plugs, wait till they heat the engine then crank it. If you go between gas engines and diesels, eventually you're going to try to crank an engine with the glow plugs powered--which spells instant death for the glow plugs, and they are expensive. If you're always running diesels, you probably won't do this.

[politicat]

2. flax, peanuts, mustard and sunflowers are better oilcrops.

How does this scheme compare to leasing a car? Mileage limits? (We buy ours new, pay them off fast, and drive them until they fall apart, so I don't actually have much info on how car retailing works. We shove our car payment money into an interest bearing account (currently a green mutual fund) and when we get enough to buy a new car, and we find a new car we want (the two do not go hand in hand) we trade in what's in our driveway and pay with a cashier's check for the replacement. (We buy new because I refuse to drive someone else's mistake.)

[dysfunctional press]

3. algae is even better than those.

and the op has industrial hemp confused with marijuana- the corporate propaganda seems to be working.

[jmowreader]

11. No, the OP very specifically said marijuana

And I did it on purpose too.

If we were to legalize marijuana, one of the first things that would happen is the demand for spiritous liquors would go down.

Just for the fuck of it, let's say 33 percent of the beer market changed to marijuana.

Beer is made from barley. Very few other things are--the reason barley was chosen for beer use in the first place is that it's the worst grain for making bread. You've instantly freed up one-third of the barley acreage to grow pot. (There'll be a disparity between the amount of acreage needed for barley and the amount needed for marijuana, but for now we can live with it.)

Obviously part of the wine market will change to marijuana, so we've got that acreage to play with. Some of the distilled spirits market will change to pot, but we can discount this acreage for two reasons: distilled spirits manufacture is more of a wheat-and-corn business and probably the corn flakes companies use more corn than the whiskey companies, and a great deal of distilled spirits are imported.

Someone upthread pointed out that there are better oilseed crops than marijuana. True and false. If you're looking strictly at oilseed production, pot sucks as a source plant. (And let's not even get started on sinsemilla!) Pot plants, OTOH, are more than just their seeds and leaves. The woody stems can substitute for both cotton and nylon--supplanting cotton gives us more pot acreage, supplanting nylon cuts down on the demand for oil to make it. This will give us far more dope than anyone could ever smoke. You can probably mulch the shit and fertilize plants with it if you had to...which cuts down on the amount of oil needed to make fertilizer. It's a holistic thing.

[dysfunctional press]

12. the op said marijuana for an oilseed crop...

"...for it involves legalizing pot so you'll have a good oilseed crop."

industrial hemp- from which the oilseed would collected, is NOT the same as marijuana(i.e. "pot") used for recreational purposes.

trying to keep the two married in people's minds is an age-old rw propaganda.

[jmowreader]

13. I AM the fucking OP!!! I said marijuana for a reason!

We gotta get the land to grow this shit from somewhere, right?

When marijuana is legalized, beer consumption will go down. All that freed-up barley acreage can be converted to marijuana acreage.

Wine consumption will go down, and we can convert all that freed-up acreage to marijuana.

We can convince people to grow dope for "personal use" and turn in the seeds and stems.

Also consider: farmers would rather grow marijuana and get paid for the seeds, the stalks plus the leaves than they would grow industrial hemp and get paid just for the stalks and seeds.

I know the difference between marijuana and industrial hemp, but as long as we've got to legalize cannabis cultivation to grow hemp let's go all the way and make pot legal too.

[dysfunctional press]

17. legalizing industrial hemp, and legalizing pot are two totally different

issues, and neither is really served by lumping them together.

"When marijuana is legalized, beer consumption will go down..."

do you have anything to back this up, or just your own conjecture?

ditto for wine...?

btw- you do realize that legalized industrial hemp would have a greatly negative impact on outdoor marijuana cultivation? the pollen from the hemp fields can travel quite a distance, and when it pollinated any high-quality pot plants- they would cease being as high-quality, and busy themselves with producing their tainted seeds.

which still wouldn't be as good a source of biodiesel as algae.

but as far as finding the land to grow hemp- it could be grown in rotation with existing crops, further reducing the need for certain pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers, not to mention making the soil easier to till the following season.

there are good and valid reasons for legalizing each- but the reasons for each are also very different, and don't have anything to do with each other. hemp has a better chance of being legalized on it's own, rather than being tied into the marijuana/pothead image that the right-wing has worked so hard to cultivate.

[jmowreader]

18. I figure I get the right to conjecture

I figure if the wingers can make all sorts of wild-ass estimates based on dreams and wishes, so can I.

Will beer and wine consumption go down if pot is made legal? Almost definitely. You know there are people out there right now who would LIKE to smoke weed but don't. Maybe they smoked in the past but can't now because of their jobs. (Some DUers have expressed this on the various pot threads we've held.) Maybe they'd like to try it but don't want to deal with people who sell illegal drugs. And maybe, just maybe, some people actually refrain from breaking even unjust laws just because obeying the law is what good citizens do. Whatever the reason, if pot was legal people WOULD smoke it, and they'd use at least part of that chunk of their disposable income they now spend on luxuries like alcohol.

How much would it go down? Probably by about a third. Some people would completely give up alcohol in favor of pot; the mental state pot puts you into is different from the mental state alcohol does, and many would prefer the pot buzz to the alcohol buzz. Others would add pot to their list of intoxicants--just as someone with a nicely-stocked bar now has a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of gin, a bottle of rum, a bottle of vodka and a humidor of fine cigars, in an environment of legal pot a person with a really well-stocked bar would also have a container of marijuana.

Let's also deal with your assertion that legalizing pot and legalizing hemp are different things. They're not, for quite a few reasons. Key among them being that to the casual observer, extremely good pot, decent pot, ditchweed and industrial hemp look almost exactly alike. The guys who judge the reefer at the Cannabis Cup know the difference between Matanuska sinse or Acapulco Gold and Iowa Ditch Weed by sight. If there are fifty people in the world who can look at a pot plant and tell--reliably enough for it to stand up in court, this is important--whether it's marijuana or hemp, I'd be surprised. Those fifty people are not going to be available to the defense when some poor bastard with a hemp grower's license pisses off the cops for some reason and gets busted for "growing pot." (Especially if the kids in town, who are too fucking stupid to know pot and hemp aren't the same thing, plant a stand of marijuana at the edge of this field. He can't exactly say it's not his--it's on his land.) The plants look almost identical so you really have to legalize both if you're going to legalize either. Otherwise the court system comes to a standstill prosecuting hemp growers for growing pot.

[dysfunctional press]

20. canada allows growing industrial hemp but not pot.

you don't have to look at the plants to tell tham apart in court- you can do chemical analysis of their thc content. although- yes, it would be very easy for most people to distinguish between industrial hemp and high-grade smokin' weed, just like it's very easy to distinguish cannabis sativa plants from cannabis indica plants just by looking at the shape of the leaves.
and as i indicated in my past response- the absolute WORST place to grow a stand of high-grade pot would be to try to hide it in a hemp field- it would end up being pollinated by the hemp, and the quality of the plants would decrease dramatically.
as far beer/wine consumption dropping by a third- it will not happen...it wouldn't surprise me if beer consumption were to actually go UP with the legalization of pot, due to a generally more permissive societal stance that would be needed to legalize weed in the first place.

[jmowreader]

10. When you lease a car, you only get one

And at the end of the lease term, you turn it in and pay them $2 per mile for anything over the mileage agreed upon in the lease contract.

Polycar is different. Buy a new Polycar and four years later it's completely paid off; when you turn it in for your new Polycar it's just a regular trade-in, no big deal.

The true advantage of Polycar is the prepaid rental thing. Take someone who keeps horses. She might want to take her horses out in the country to ride--so she's gotta get out the diesel pickup, hook up the trailer, take the horses out into the country, ride for a few hours, then come home with them. No problem so far. Horses are an expensive affection--so expensive that she's probably got only one vehicle that doesn't have legs on it and she has to drive that fucking 10mpg F-350 everywhere she goes. But with Polycar, when she needs a truck to take her horses to the country she just has to go to the Polycar store and pick one up, and she has all the advantages of a small car for daily use...like parking ease and sub-$100 fill-ups.

I know people will rent trucks.

[Jane Austin]

4. I like the way you think!

I've never understood why every householder has their own lawnmower. Or Table Saw. Or tiller. Or whatever like that that you use either once a week, once a month or once a year.

I'd love to own a pickup or other towing/ hauling vehicle with other people. I hate having our Suburban around just for those purposes.

[TygrBright]

5. You are quite correct when you note:

>>"...the United States is designed so that you really need a car."<<

Yet it doesn't seem to have occurred to you what that implies.

Rather than continue tweaking a bad design, we need to solve the problem and RE-design the United States so that we have a network of mass transit that minimizes the need for individual vehicles. This can be done.

Cities and suburbs need a core network of rapid transit for intermediate transport between bedroom communities and work/commerce centers, and a flexible, consistent network of fixed (trolleys, subways, trams, etc.) and flexible (buses, Zipcar-type cooperative vehicle access, taxis, etc.) transit for transport among neighborhoods, commercial centers, etc.

Rural areas need regular rail commuter routes to hub cities and rapid transit lines to nearby towns and population centers, and flexible public transit options including cooperative vehicle access as well as buses.

The nation as a whole needs a well-designed grid of primary and secondary rail hubs that will link cities and towns within states and interstate with high-speed, high-efficiency rail transport. We also need a public communications grid that will link us via the internet and wireless technology to enable everyone, even in small rural towns, to communicate effectively in virtual commerce and office networks at minimal cost, and a viable publicly-supported goods transport and delivery system as efficient as the Post Office USED to be, so that we can go to our computer in the morning, type in our grocery order, and have it delivered while we're having our post-lunch teleconference with our team members in other cities across America.

It's do-able, and the massive investment required in infrastructure redesign and installation would create jobs and prosperity on an unprecedented scale.

Think BIG, dammit!! Tinkering around the edges and trying to pinch pennies is how we got INTO this mess.

idealistically,
Bright

[NJCher]

6. not to mention wasted brain power

I hate my commute to work because it's 90" down the drain. Let someone else do the driving while I spend my time reading or working on my students' papers.




Cher

[Exultant Democracy]

16. Think of what it would do to our economy

a massive over-haul of our infrastructure is just what we need to make new American jobs now, and would help us remain competitive in the future.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. How about...

1. Suffer for a few years while we get people used to not "owning" things
2. Let the chips fall where they may, and help people move closer to work
3. Never elect any more FUCKING REPUBLICANS.

[jmowreader]

8. Number three is most doable

The most obvious problem we've got is all these Fucking Republicans. Solve that problem and a lot of other problems are going to be solvable.

Your assertion number one? People need to own a means of transportation. I don't care what it is. I don't care WHO it is. What's every kid want for Christmas? A bicycle--a means of transportation. What's every teenager want for her 16th birthday? A car. I never met a 17-year-old who got a summer job to save up for stock certificates, but millions of 17-year-olds are out there selling fast food and cutting grass to save up for cars. (These are the ones who got stock certificates for Sweet 16. :evilgrin:)

Every society thinks this way. I am willing to bet good money that you could go to some country in Africa where the preferred mode of transportation is the Jackass, and there's a whole slew of kids out there who are digging 300-foot wells with shovels to save up to buy their first Jackass. (Edited to remove term that might possibly be racist.)

If a bunch of DUers were to pool their money and build a community where all the vehicles were shared and no one had their own car, no one except that group of DUers would move there. Someone might think, "if I've got to get the baby to the hospital right now, I can either wait for a taxi that may not arrive, pay an unbudgeted $300 for an ambulance ride, or load her into the car and drive to the emergency room." Or grocery shopping--you can carry the food home in a rucksack if you shop every day; no one would want to. I know they do it that way in Europe. This isn't Europe.

Your assertion number two? How many brazillions of people who work somewhere today worked on the other side of town three years ago? (jmowreader raises his hand.) Before the Party of Personal Responsibility decided sending all the jobs to China was a good idea, you could go to work for the XYZ Company at the age of 18 and retire from there at the age of 65. This happened all the time--in some communities, The Company was an extension of your family and no one ever left. This doesn't happen anymore. You get a job at ABC, they move their factory to Alabama so you get a job at DEF who outsources to Bangladesh putting you at GHI who decides to quit making the thing they hired you for so you wind up at JKL, MNO, PQR, STU, and TUV Corporations before you finish out your days at WAL-mart. Oh gawd let's not get back to the era where the company gave you a place to live and the company gave you chits to use at the company store because the company didn't believe in paying workers in Genuine Yankee Greenbacks.

[BlackVelvet04]

15. Not everybody WANTS to live

closer to work. So, what then? Are they going to be legislated into moving closer to work.

[jmowreader]

19. Some people think so

After all, in tiny towns in Europe everyone lives within walking/bike riding distance of their employment, or at least within that distance of a train station...so obviously we as Americans should be willing to do the same thing.

Never mind the fact that Europe has invested brazillions of dollars over the last 120 years in public transportation networks while we spent the same time period in developing roadbeds and private vehicles. We don't have the infrastructure to live like Europeans and we don't have anywhere to put it.

[madokie]

9. I like the oil-seed part

basically a lease with keep option, I kinda' like that.