As cities have gotten more numerous, larger, and denser, they’ve come to resemble fractally-packed systems in which the billions of end points require exosomatic energy to be serviced. A single city can easily have thousands of miles of roads within it. Trucks made possible a network of intermediate nodes, such as individual grocery stores, which could not exist in the way they now do if they had to be serviced by rail. Those nodes, in turn, are accessed nearly entirely by private motorcars. The quickness means that perishable products may be shipped, and the constant flow of trucks means that any given node may entirely replenish its supplies every few days. It’s essentially a systemwhich exchange s huge amounts of oil for convenience. The very existence of suburbia is predicated on such distribution. Virtually everything in our homes and in our stores arrived by truck. Trucks also delivered and built the 4.1 million miles of roads they travel on. Trucks deliver the gas and diesel all other transportation depends on. Trucks plant, harvest, and deliver food. Trucks remove the 685,000 tons of garbage that piles up every day in the U.S. 188 Grocery stores would be out of food within a week if trucks stopped running. Recent progress in electrification of cars has shown some promise. But the energy required to power a 50,000-80,000-pound vehicle either by electricity via batteries or overhead cables (catenary trucks) is very large. One recent study showed that to electrify transport trucks on just a 24 mile stretch (out of 175,000 miles of total roads) in California alone would require 1% of the entire California current electric use. 189 The reason Tesla cars are currently feasible as luxury personal transport is in large part due to their aerodynamics and low weight; not the case with a large 30-ton box going down the highway. To power such energy-hungry, long-distance vehicles using batteries would take up a large portion of their potential cargo-hauling capacity. A recent study showed such a battery would take up 93% of the average weight of a full load now carried by existing gasoline-powered semis, and the efficiency would drop precipitously because much of the stored battery energy would simply be required to move the additional weight of the batteries. 190 These d rawbacks don’t take into account potential problems with running out of lithium to outfit an entire trucking industry over time. Electric cars are somewhat promising ( with caveats), but electric trucks not so much, and certainly not commercial airliners. T ransportation of goods is another reminder of Liebig’s Law of the minimum – how do we get food, materials, equipment, to all the end nodes of the human superorganism using something other than liquid fuels?
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