Presenting the Transportation Options
Have your student groups present their findings on their transportation fuel. Be sure the students in the audience help with the grading of the presentation by giving them a rubric on presentation skills. This allows all of the students to be engaged and analyze the art of speaking. This is an essential skill you need to help foster in your students and one that should be discussed after each presentation. I will also have a sheet with a few questions that I would like the students to glean the answers from each of the presentations. This ensures that they must listen to the presentation and they write down information with which they can use to think critically when engaged in conversation about the varied types of alternative fuels. Be sure to encourage lively debate and discussion after each of the presentations.
Sustainability is a word I did not use in this unit until this last section, but it is what we need to work towards with our transportation sector. Sustainable transportation will have to include a renewable fuel source to power vehicles. Sustainability to the transportation sector will also have to equate to a substantial decrease in the amount and kinds of pollutants that are emitted from the vehicles. We need to think in a different way in order to build a truly sustainable transportation system.
The internal combustion engine was an amazing innovation and revolutionized our whole existence. The wisdom of the continued burning of our limited supply of fossil fuels in them must be questioned. We are seeing exponential growth in fossil fuel usage in the last twenty plus years and auto fuel efficiency standards have changed very little in this time. It is no secret that burning these fuels has had devastating impacts on our environment. We are now looking to biofuels to help us work toward a carbon neutral transportation system that uses the internal combustion engine.
We need to take a long hard look at the efficiency of all of our transportation options. Internal combustion engines are around 10-15 percent efficient at burning fossil fuels. If you take into consideration the processing and transportation of the fossil fuels to the pump, the efficiency of the process is reduced significantly. Biofuels are dependent on a fossil fuel-based agricultural system to produce them. The efficiency of producing biofuels is very low, to the point where it is seen by many to not even be a net gain of energy if you factor in all aspects of production.
Electric vehicles have been introduced many times in the past but have been taken off the market. Automobile manufactures realize that these vehicles are efficient and do not need the liquid fuel infrastructure we currently use and they have very low maintenance costs.
Electric motors are about 90% efficient. The current production of electricity is also fossil fuel based but it does not have to be solely done in this manner. Advances in solar photovoltaic cells have occurred and they are around 16% efficient, while the efficiency of solar thermal electric generation is around 35% presently. If we were to move toward electric vehicles that were charged by solar energy, we would be able to achieve an overall efficiency of around 30%. This would be an amazing increase in the efficiency of this sector and also cause a dramatic decrease in the amount of carbon that is emitted.
Transportation needs to move away from the polluting and inefficient internal combustion engine and embrace the use of electric vehicles. This shift would dramatically increase the quality of our air, revitalize our soils, and give the water resources a better chance of buffering the effects of transportation used in our society.
Our society needs to have clean air, water, and soil in order to continue to survive on this planet. If we continue to use inefficient means of transportation and exploit our natural resources, we will continue to degrade and contaminate the very things we need most. We need to be reminded how delicate our existence really is. We can only live three weeks without nourishing and untainted food, three days without clean adequate water, and three minutes without oxygen. All of these three things are compromised as we continue using fossil fuels to power our transportation sector and our society.
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