80/20 rule and all that, I agree. I'm originally from a ranch in Wyoming 65m+ from the nearest grocery store, and those use-cases (ag, distance) are burned into my gut. It makes for some bad intuitive generalized conclusions on this topic from time-to-time.
no sweat, it's a pleasure to communicate with people who are able to think systematically and who can do an actual discussion rather than just shouting from rooftops.
Please, don't mistake me - I'm still opinionated. I just got tired of yelling on the Internet. :-)
On this topic, though, in this context: no need to yell. You make a good point.
I will say that it is devilishly hard. Liquid fuels have some impressive characteristics, that make them an easy "go-to" for almost 100% of our heavy portable-power use-cases, and economic alternatives for those use-cases must almost be developed one-at-a-time. I'm an engineer, not a policy constructivist, so somebody saying "tax it" to bring alternatives to economic parity is vaguely unsatisfying to me.
The economics of it are the main reason why I think batteries are the only way forward we have with current technology. We desperately need a solution that is not only carbon neutral, but cheaper than gasoline power at the same time, using a cost-of-ownership kind of calculation.
If Tesla can deliver on making the required batteries as cheap for the usecases outlined above, it is the most promising way of solving an important part of the very near future crisis of unpaid negative externalities we've been causing in our fossil fuel based economy. Neither fuel cells nor bio fuel (both ways to get back higher energy density) can do this, because both can never beat the economics of fossil fuel when you run the numbers, especially in our post shallow water fracking world.
There is a big caveat however: It won't do any good if we continue to demolish the clean electric energy we got from nuclear and replace it with fossil fuels. Clean energy in total actually slowed down if not reversed because of recent nuclear scares. That includes Germany btw., often cited for their solar/wind efforts, but this was hardly able to replace the nuclear plants they're closing at the same time. This ist the stuff where I'm getting angry at the world... it's like a frog in a slowly boiling pot throwing out his supply of ice cubes because it scared him.
