Hello Hasbeen,
45 % oh that seems a very big subsidy. Oh wait, did you mean 45% on the electricity to charge the car ?
Now a steam car does take my fancy, that could be a real goer.
What is methane clathrate ?

The only problem I have with electric cars, other than the price, is
that the number of miles I do a year is so low that petrol price is no problem.
A friend of mine has a Mitsubishi iEMEV as a second car which he drives
to work everyday and uses at weekends.
His weekly charging bill is under $2.
There is still a long way to go with battery development but there
may be fundamental physical restraints that will never enable 1000km
range electric cars.

"generated by a nuclear chip,"
I do not see that happening ever !
The weight of the shielding would rule that out.
Unless of course they get cold fusion to work.

So it is horses for courses.

Give the Death Penalty to stupidity & you'll reduce the world's need for energy by 85 % instantly.
We could use the empty University buildings for other, more practical applications anyway.

Bazz methane clathrate is a form of methane & water ice. They have recently found it is much more common than previously thought. Apparently there is a great deal of in in ocean trenches.

The Japanese recently did some experimental harvesting, sort of like hovering it up, off their coast, & suggest it would not be hard to develop a commercial harvesting technique.

Well like all these things, I'll believe it when I see it, but who would have believed 15 years ago, that we could harvest oil with horizontal drilling 5000 Ft down in the ocean.

Wikipedia has a good description of the different types of the stuff, try a Google. They have not caught up with how plentiful the stuff has been found to be, but gives a good idea otherwise.

Ahhh yes I had heard of it, I just did not realise that was what you were referring to.

Quote;
Well like all these things, I'll believe it when I see it, but who
would have believed 15 years ago, that we could harvest oil with
horizontal drilling 5000 Ft down in the ocean.

Well actually it is a quite old technique and has been used for many
years but of course it is now more frequently used for tight oil.
The reason Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait was because they used
horizontal drilling under the border to get at Iraqi oil.
I have not heard of them using it underwater. I presume they are not
fracking with it.

The drilling in tight oil formations is going at a frantic pace and
they are starting to have credit problems with Wall St getting a bit
touchy about the poor returns.
It is the Red Queen syndrome, running fast to stay in the same place.

Warmair,

You were probably only looking at a poll in your local greenie news. The reliable polls showed that the carbon tax was as popular as a dose of clap.

The real result is that there were a stream of large energy users closing down and their loss of production was taken up overseas, as unemployment increased, and an independent study showed that the true effect of the carbon tax reduced Australian emissions by 0.1%.

The carbon tax is the most efficient tax if and only if the tax is spread evenly over all countries. Shifting production from a high tax country to a low tax country has zero effect on total emissions.

Bazz and Hasbeen, I have a portable saw mill and it charges it's own battery via what I think is called a stator.

Why couldn't electric cars use a similar system to recharge as the go?

Perhaps it's not possible, but maybe you guys can tell me.