Zakharra wrote:It seems like a fair number of people here hate the IC engine with a passion for some reason. So I'd like to ask those that don't like it, WHY don't you like the IC engine? Despite the problems an IC engine has, it is extremely convenient for a lot of people. It frees up people from needing to live within walking distance of their work or a railroad. It seems like thew benefits outweigh the costs to a large degree.
Depends on how you count those costs. (Very well known bit of systems theory; things that are positive to individual participants in the system can be very bad for the system as a whole.)
IC engines are major sources of really problematic pollutants. The short-term stuff kills a lot of people every year; the long-term stuff might manage to kill us all by breaking agriculture.
In terms of being drivers for development patterns, you get suburbs, which are really bad land use; dense land use (cities, more than 10 houses/acre) and light land use (less than 1 house/10 acres) are both (at least potentially) OK in ecological terms; it's the stuff in between that's the problem, and there you go, suburbs. Cars pry cities apart -- all that space for parking and freeways -- when what is good about cities arises from density. (And then you hit really intractable capacity problems on freeways and everything slows to a crawl anyway.)
You get a bunch of nasty, nasty wars over control of oil. You get fracking, you get the social consequences of unpopular wars, you just generally get a very large indirect expense. You get Dutch Disease/resource-cursed regions like Nigeria, Venezuela, Alberta, the whole middle East, and Russia, which causes no end of trouble. The direct expense when it isn't possible to live without having one car per adult member of the household is pretty high, too, and big swathes of Anglo NorAm have been developed so that's the only thing possible. Made a lot of money for someone.
Personal transportation is a fine thing; anybody with three kids doesn't want to take the subway with only one adult available for kid wrangling. People do live out in the country. Machine traction for agriculture is
essential. It doesn't have to be powered by IC engines or fossil carbon, it's just that's what we happen to have, in large part because of the Great War and historical accidents around aircraft.
It's been pretty obvious since 1970 or so we should be doing something different; it hasn't happened, in part because half of everything is invested in an oil stock somewhere. And now it's getting to it's going to be extremely expensive, maybe cultural discontinuity expensive.
Didn't have to be. A certain amount of annoyance results.