No there are plenty of ordinary street engines over 30% (which I think is the norm these days). There is a Mazda Skyactiv that gets closer to 40%:
https://www.automotivepowertra...
An F1 engine with TERS could get over 50%:
https://www.motorauthority.com...
Large turbines can now exceed 60% it turns out:
So it's not as profitable (or sensible, but that's beside the point) as charging an EV, sure. But it looks like it could still be profitable in a lot of jurisdictions, perhaps moreso than the dinosaur juice the stations are currently selling.
The problem with hydrocarbons (apart from all the climate/war stuff) is that no use of hydrocarbons comes close to the efficiency of an electric powertrain - your typical ICE car turns around 66% of the energy in the fuel into waste heat for example, and the most efficient possible uses with either super-exotic million-dollar engines or giant turbines are in the 50~60% ballpark. An EV powertrain can turn well over 90% of the electricity that goes into the charge plug into power at the wheels. And if you're getting your hydrocarbons from e-fuels, those are fuels that are highly energy-inefficient to make. I saw a study that came out around the pandemic estimating that replacing all fossil fuels with e-fuels around that time would require world electricity generation to be tripled to quadroupled.
But there are some relatively niche roles where the energy density is critical such as in aircraft where this could make sense. The high combustion temperatures of fossil fuels are also needed for some industrial processes. The sheer inefficiency of the whole supply chain from renewable power to kinetic energy at the wheels/prop makes it useless as a mainstream transportation solution though.
At $1.50/gal ready to go in a car with just energy as an input, even with those huge up-front costs for the machine it could make sense for gas stations to have an array of these constantly filling their Regular or Economy tanks. Especially in places with more expensive gas like basically everywhere a random person walking around with an assault rifle would be cause for alarm and not just Tuesday.
Well you don't have to enable the cell modem, but if you do, you could connect it with Phreeli:
A smartphone is a handheld ARM-based computer with crappy controls and an unusual network adapter, a cellular modem. All but a few of them come with shitty closed OSes, but the same is true of desktop computers. He should try a Purism Librem 5 for example.
There is nothing inherent to a smartphone that makes it an Orwellian surveillance and tracking device any more than there is anything inherent to a desktop computer that makes it an instrument of Microsoft's control over users.
They're two petrostates that are working particularly hard to reduce their use of fossil fuels.
But his ass IS fat...
Communist and socialist climate cultists won't be satisfied until everyone works by LED light, and everything is powered by wind turbines and solar with storage.
FTFY, comrade!
Although JD Vance may not have a particular hateboner for wind he's still a fossil fuel industry lapdog like all the other Republicans, and they've already demonstrated a willingness and ability to pay more money for dirtier energy sources.
The UAE building a nuclear power plant - note how a smart dealer doesn't use the product. See also, Norway's EV adoption.
Then you pick one of the half dozen battery technologies that are cheap at scale for a large installation and call it a day.
Or better yet, wait a few months and then maybe you can pick a set of super-safe batteries with a crazy charge/discharge rate that cost the same as li-ion but last multiple centuries:
That will do approximately jack shit for climate change because the problem isn't simply that we're using too many resources, it's that we're using the wrong kinds of resources. There are issues lessened by population reduction but climate change is not very sensitive to it. We got ourselves most of the way into this mess with just a fraction of the people using the wrong kinds of resources.
The biggest climate benefit to come out of this might be the emissions reductions caused by future avoidable pandemic lockdowns and the remote work that comes with them. Still not much in the grand scheme of things, but you'd have to kill something like 1/6th of humanity to match those reductions. And we already know that Trumpkins would rather take their chances with India-style 24/7 public cremations than suffer a pandemic lockdown like responsible adults.
Meanwhile, Trump's pro-fossil-fuel anti-renewable policies and anti-EV policies will make climate change far worse. Pro-cryptocurrency and pro-AI policies certainly don't help either. The only factor limiting the full disaster potential of his policies is that fossil fuels are more expensive these days, so Trump is fighting against the market forces pushing for new energy capacity to be built as renewables instead of fossil fuels.
A socialist pharma lab could work quite well while paying the scientists who do the actual work good money, it would just have sane pay for executive management and a nonexistent marketing budget. That's what pharma companies spend most of their money on, marketing and executive pay:
https://marylandmatters.org/20...
But the proof is in the pudding:
I think that the amount of investment directly controlled by total fuckwits in today's economy is a big part of the problem. In the past if you were a wealthy fuckwit and wanted to invest in some stocks, you were almost certain to hire someone who knew what the hell they were doing to manage your investments just because that was the easiest way to buy stock at all. Today the path of least resistance to buying stocks is to do it directly through some sort of app where nobody who knows a damn is in sight to guide you, and that's how we ended up with Tesla being worth more than every big automaker combined at one point and other epic stupidities.
It certainly doesn't help that glorified gambling schemes like cryptocurrency have been minting more wealthy fuckwits at an unprecedented rate. Putting most of humanity's wealth under the control of know-nothings has consequences.
Writing software is more fun than working.
