So then it's buy a new fridge for $900 vs fix old one for $100 plus $500 in burned coal over 10 years.
Now if power rates doubled then it would always win to buy the new fridge even if nothing to repair.
First of all, I don't trust a new fridge these days to last 10 years but I can easily see this one purring for another 20 with minor repairs.
Secondly, this is a combo fridge+freezer unit, with 2 compressors. New ones only seem to have one compressor, which makes them somewhat more efficient but if it dies, both my freezer and fridge die with it.
And lastly, it's not my fault we're still burning coal :/ I'm planning to invest in personal solar...
To me this is the really interesting part in all of this. If there was no efficiency gains generation to generation.. say a piece of clothing.. seems pretty obvious to make slightly better if it can last 100% longer for 20% more material/energy/cost.
Things like cars/ fridges / AC units? The math is complex. Think of all the cars on the road right now where 30 year old cars. The air in LA and SF would be like the air in Beijing or Mexico City. It is in fact both good AND bad for the environment at the same time that things are slowly retired and replaced with newer models.
But for example gas furnaces have slowly improved from 50%??? efficient to 99.9% efficient. Clearly they can't get better. But for example, heat pumps can get > 100% efficient.
Those old cars could be made as efficient as new ones by replacing every part in them other than the chassis. That's prohibitively expensive now, but mostly because there's no standard for engine compartment size and mount point locations. If I could order a "Type 2A" replacement engine instead of a "year T brand X model Y" replacement engine--or even get a 5-years-used-and-refurbished "Type 2A" engine from someone upgrading their "2011 Brand M Model N" commuter sedan, and put it in my "2001 Brand X Model Y" commuter sedan--that would solve a lot of the vehicle obsolescence problems. Moving mechanical parts wear out a lot faster than fixed structural parts. Why throw them all out at the same time?
So let's take a 20 year old car, and pretend it was future proofed to take more upgrades. Would you want it today?
* The style wouldn't be right at all. So let's pretend that we are globally willing to accept out of style things for the sake of the environment. Which is a big if, but let's go with it.
* The steering wheel may or may not have airbags. The doors and seats would certainly not have side impact airbags. The doors and seats would not be designed to take these advances. You would need to basically replace the doors and seats to upgrade these new safety features. But what if these new safety features made the door 2 inches thicker? Since you aren't replacing the frame, you now lost 2 inches of internal space. Maybe the driver would still fit, maybe it wouldn't.
* Engines were much much less efficient 20 years ago. New engines have all kinds of things that a mechanic can better explain. Things like carburetors are gone, things like computer controller ignition are in. Would the upgradable car have known about all these future changes? Maybe, maybe not.
* Frames have gotten much stronger / more crash proof in the last 20 years. Think of better crumple zones. So if you wanted to upgrade that 20 year old car to be as safe as a modern car, how would you change the crumple zones within the frame itself?
* Metal itself rusts over time. Things can slow it, but there will always be some rust. What do you do if the frame has rusted in ways that can't be fixed?
* Crashes can permanently damage cars. Say your frame is bent in a crash. Insurance companies write this car off as totaled, and declare it no longer safe to drive. Can you always fix this kind of thing? Perhaps sometimes. Would you want to drive a frame that has been welded back together after a crash? I would not.
This is not an exhaustive list but it partially proves a point. In a field where innovation is happening, it is VERY hard to future proof your hardware. If you disagree and are a programmer, show me an active codebase that has never had a refactor. By going down this path, you are basically saying the contents of a given method can be swapped out, but we can never refactor the codebase. So show me a 20 year old C++ project with no refactor ever done, just methods being swapped out like your replaceable car analogy.
Styling and design still have room to work if your engine compartment standard does little more than define a minimum volume of unobstructed interior space and several fixed mount point locations. You can make an ATX computer case look like practically anything, so long as the screw holes are in the right place, the I/O shield is the right size, and you leave enough internal clearance for the CPU cooler and video card.
The mount point locations became standard on outboard motors in the 80s, when Yamaha decided to use the same pattern as BRP (then OMC), who had in turn copied the pattern used by Evinrude in the 60s. So you could possibly buy a 50-year-old boat and mount a new outboard motor onto it without drilling any new holes or replacing the transom. The outboard motor bolt hole pattern standard does not affect the thickness of the seat cushions, or the size of the docking cleats, or anything else. You can have many different standards that are not mutually incompatible.
The idea is that auto manufacturers would add to a list of standards, rarely obsoleting some. Maybe the 20-year-old car only conforms to the engine compartment standard and the front-wheel-drive automatic transmission standard. The 15-year-old car conforms to those and to the steering wheel (with airbag) standard. The 10-year-old car conforms to those, plus a side-impact standard and a rollover safety standard. So you might not be able to upgrade the 20-year-old car to be as safe as the new car, but you could certainly upgrade it to be as fuel-efficient or as powerful, which might be all you really care about until the frame rusts out. If you are lucky, the old car might have been the basis for a newer standard, and you could upgrade some things as though it were conformant to begin with. A new car would certainly conform to all the existing standards, and if its standards-conforming side-impact air bags were recalled 3 years later, any mechanic would be able to replace them, instead of just the dealers for one maker.
Any given standard would only be replaced by an improved standard, and that might still be backwards compatible to the old standard. So I certainly would take that future-proofed 20-year-old car with a brand-new off-the-shelf powertrain in it, especially if it cost only $8k instead of the $24k I might otherwise have to spend on an entirely new vehicle.
You can't have a standard for a technology that doesn't exist yet. But anything that does have a standard can likely be repaired and upgraded more cheaply in the future. It preserves more of the value in the used cars.
If someone really needs those side-curtain air bags, they would be able to trade in their old vehicle, at a higher price, to someone who doesn't value safety features as highly, and use the proceeds to help pay for a newer vehicle with more of those features.
But yeah, it's definitely an interesting balance to think about.
Wind power takes up land that could be better used for nature or growing food, and kills birds. The turbines are made out of materials that have the same problems as other things. Clearly reducing demand for power is still a good thing, even if we got to 100% renewable power. (And at current low renewable power levels, 1 extra KW of electricity is directly coming from oil or coal or something nasty)
Recently my ~20 year old fridge stopped working and I spent the better part of the day diagnosing the issue, getting a replacement part and fixing it. Sure, I could have spent that time doing wage labor, call someone to fix it or even get a new fridge and I would have ended up with a net profit. But to me personally, the bigger opportunity cost would have been missing the chance to tinker, learn about fridge circuits, compressors, thermistors, diagnose and fix the issue and enjoy success.