EVs and Road Taxes                                                                                                                             

The Federal Government currently funds road construction and maintenance by imposing an excise tax on vehicle fuels. Whilst this regime is problematic in some regards, up till now it has worked reasonably well on the basis that the amount of fuel used roughly proportional to the number of road miles travelled.

However, with the future pointing to petroleum powered vehicles being supplanted by Electric Drive Vehicles (EVs), this method of raising road funding comes into question - with EV owners paying no excise - and the government is scrambling to develop new methods of taxing EVs to compensate.

This is going to prove an extremely difficult exercise because:

• The tax couldn't be applied to the vehicles themselves because some EVs might be travelling extensively on the roads every day, whilst others are only used for short trips or are garaged for lengthy periods - ie the tax would not be proportional to road usage.
• The tax couldn't be applied to the amount of electricity used because it would be impossible to determine whether electricity consumed had been for domestic or commercial use, or for charging vehicles. To address this the government might legislate special vehicle charging plugs that monitored power usage, but that would create a whole new industry in illegal charging facilities and home-grown special charging stations which in turn would require government inspectors to root out those cheating the system.

The obvious answer would be to introduce a Roads Maintenance levy in the Federal Taxation system (similar to the Medicare levy). Whilst some might argue they use public transport and don't drive a car, they  nevertheless consume products that transport companies have to deliver by road and are therefore beneficiaries of the transport network. 

People also all have to pay via taxation for some things they might never use, but are required by the rest of society - the electricity grid despite some people having solar and being off-grid, Universities for people who will never require tertiary education, NDIS for people who don't need daily assistance - there are many things we pay for that we as individuals don't need but are essential for the successful functioning of a democratic society.

 Who discovered Australia?                                                                                                                        

Aborigines have been living in Australia for thousands of years, so how could anyone claim it was discovered by Captain Cook when there was a whole race of people who already knew it was there?

What are we to make of these claims?

The problem lies in the fact that people are viewing the situation from the perspective of prior knowledge. They are in effect saying "we saw it first, therefore we discovered it". An example of this would be as follows:

'I'm late for work. After I rush out of the house, my wife notices that I left my lunch behind. Later that day I discover I've left my lunch at home.' - Surely no-one would object to my using the word discover in this sentence - even though my wife made the discovery first.

Statements of this nature shouldn't be viewed from the prior knowledge viewpoint, but should be considered against the background of context.

The aboriginal community are quite right to claim that Cook didn't discover Australia because that is in line with their thinking. But by the same token, when viewed from the standpoint of British (or colonial) history, it is also quite right for historians to claim that Cook did discover Australia, because no-one in Britain at the time knew of its existence, and his claim to finding it would have been, by any definition of the word, a discovery as far as the British were concerned.

The argument really boils down to a semantic dilemma which is readily solved by considering the context in which the statement is made.

 

The Lunar Space Elevator                                                                                                                      

1. 

The idea of a Space Elevator was first mooted by Russian Yuri Artsutanov in 1960 and his successors in scientific circles have come up with various proposals as to how this concept might be turned into a reality.

Basically, the concept involves launching a satellite into a geostationary (or geosynchronous) orbit above the earth after which in this location it would rotate around the earth at the same angular velocity as the earth's daily rotation, therefore appearing to be stationary above a fixed point on the planet. Once established in orbit, a cable could then be lowered from the satellite and fixed to an anchor point on the earth's surface, enabling a specially designed vehicle to climb up and down the cable, transporting supplies and materials to and from the satellite. This would eliminate the need for rockets to service the satellite and transport astronauts between earth and satellite. 

A system such as this, however, would face insurmountable problems including the following:

·  The geostationary orbit is located approximately 35,800 km above the earth’s surface, and a cable of this length would be required to tether the satellite to the planet. The cable connected to the satellite would have to support the total weight of cable below which would result in a strain on the cable that no known materials could withstand.

·  The cable climbing vehicle would need to be powered on its ascent to the satellite. Storage of the required fuel aboard the vehicle would add mass, increasing the strain well past breaking point of the cable. Using solar power might be an option but the weight of solar panels required would again add to the mass pulling on the cable.

·  The cable would be exposed to adverse weather events, high velocity stratospheric jet streams, lightning strikes, cyclones and meteorite impact.

The Lunar Space Station; A new use for an old concept

For any 2 bodies in an orbital system there exist 5 locations (known as Lagrange points) at which the pull of gravity of each body and their orbital motion results in zero gravity at that point. For the earth/moon system the Lagrange point no. 1 shown on the diagram below is located just 58,000 Km above the lunar surface.

Although the distance of 58,000 Km for an L1 Lagrange satellite above the moon is greater than the 35,800 Km cable required for a satellite/earth elevator, it can be considered feasible as a site for a satellite connected to the lunar surface for the following reasons:

• Lunar gravity is 1/6th of earth's and this would result in a dramatic reduction in the load, and therefore the strain, on the cable
• The strain would be further reduced by the fact that the lunar pull on the cable would be counteracted by earth's gravity for a substantial part of the distance.
• A large solar panel array on the moon could supply electricity via the cable to power the travelling elevator cab.
• The elevator would not be subject to the atmospheric disturbances posed by an earth/satellite elevator.

The main benefit in establishing such an elevator at Lagrange 1 would allow personnel, equipment and construction materials to be delivered to a moon base without delivery rockets required to carry sufficient fuel to escape lunar gravity on their return leg.