Putting that technology into the electric grid and combining it with renewables will enable dirt cheap, limitless energy, which will contribute in a major way towards solving all the other problems OP enumerated.
Consider using the term "low-carbon energy" in place of "renewable energy". We want to promote the right stuff. Biofuel is considered renewable but is high carbon. Nuclear fusion would be low carbon but not considered renewable. The difference matters hugely for future energy policy.
Renewable is a more strict term than carbon-neutral, it's true, but all "renewables" are by definition closed-loop and hence carbon-neutral.
As an extreme case in point, wood in particular is a horrifying energy source due to health detriment from particulates.
Have a look at some data:
https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/ipcc-...
Source: Schlomer S., et.al., 2014: Annex III: Technology-specific cost and performance parameters. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILUC
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel#Greenhouse_gas_emissio...
So I think it's fair to actually consider nuclear fusion and nuclear fission in breeder reactors both to be renewable. B. Cohen said the same about breeder fission reactors in the 1980s [1].
Uranium in seawater can be extracted at 10x world energy scale for billions of years. It replenishes continuously through crustal erosion and plate tectonics. Sounds pretty renewable.
But according to policies we're writing today, the term renewable does not include fusion or fission in breeders. I consider this problematic. Thus I think we all should prefer either "sustainable energy" or "low-carbon energy".
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
High-burnup nuclear power, under reasonable assumptions, is sustainable for hundreds of thousands of years. Fusion is presumably sustainable as long as the Earth exists, as are solar and wind. Coal is not sustainable at all.
By attaching wheels and motors, electric cars make people pay more for batteries than they ever would otherwise be willing to spend on energy storage.
Off peak charging already exists today, however there aren't enough electric cars to make utilities heavily incentivise of peak charging solutions (it would only make sense for me to do so if my car was fully electric and not a hybrid due to initial installation costs)
The problem is that the best time to charge a car is immediately after it has been used, so it is ready to go the next time. Who wants a half dead car sitting around?
(Range anxiety for ICE will eventually make a huge comeback. Electricity is everywhere, imagine driving a car where you couldn't just plug in anywhere the electric grid is and had to go to "stations" of a scarce mostly single-purpose resource for power. Haha.)
You generally don't need a full charged car at all times of the day: if you and your car both know you'll be at work for the next 8 hours and most likely you only need the 20 miles to get home, and a couple after work errands (plus some range floor for emergencies), there's plenty of leeway in how and when it charges.
It's the usual sort of bootstrapping hurdle that a lot of the "user interface" of it probably can't be well developed until there's a general demand for it, and there won't be a general demand for it from the Utility side until there's maybe a larger installed base of vehicles with the capability.
But, the interesting part is still pointing out that plenty of people are already thinking about it, and it is a somewhat exciting part of the equation of how more electric vehicles potentially better balance the electric grid more so than "destabilize" it or hugely increase peak demand. (Because not only are they capable of smartly arranging their charge times to off-peak demand times, but also are giant roving batteries that can themselves act as temporary storage buffers for the grid.)
Me? I charge my car when I come home from work. Provided it's charged by morning I don't car when in that time it's charging
The article does not claim that electric cards do not reduce emissions sufficiently to solve the problem of climate change all at once. It claims that electric cars increase emissions and that increasing emissions exacerbates the problem of climate change.
It's not saying that electric cars are only a partial solution. It's saying that they are part of the problem.
I take a bit of issue at his swipe 'if you can afford them'. Since the price is falling fast enough that electric cars should be actually cheaper than gasoline ones within a few years. Which means we might end up with more electric cars than we would gasoline ones. So yeah some of the negative externalies are fixed, CO2 emissions and air pollution. But others are not, traffic fatalities and injuries, traffic congestion, industrial pollution, resource depletion. And low prices may mean more of the latter not less.
We have to improve on a lot of fronts and the attention argument is one of the better ones... finding better ways to achieve the same is worthy pursuit. Sailing across the ocean to save on emissions worthy action for some young female climate activist, but certainly not something many of us would be willing to do.
The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themselves are only a small fraction of the transportation industry to begin with.
And not to mention that there's global shipping, construction, meat consumption all of which is by itself faster increasing than any environemntal solution in the respective domains which all only marginally change the equation to begin with.
Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing, all that matters at the end is if our efforts were significant enough to not degrade our environment. And we're off by a magnitude or two and that's not going to change until we make radical changes to how we manage our societies.
If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"?
EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless.
If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.
Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.
But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution.
And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.
> spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.
Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change:
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...
I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption.
Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!".
If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!".
If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!"
If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!"
It never ends.
This isn't true. No one is arguing we should sit around and wait for a perfect solution, and that's a really dishonest framing of this article.
The argument is that electric cars are over-weighted as a solution, and it's one I see all the time. Not only that, but it directly conflicts with other goals. In the US, cities and states are still investing in expanding highway and car-based infrastructure at a time when we desperately need to be moving away from car-centric cities. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build, so putting resources into car-centric infrastructure means that a) we will be stuck with car-centric cities for a long time, and b) there will be less money for non-car infrastructure. If instead, we stopped building new car infrastructure and poured our efforts into non-car infrastructure, we'd be much better off.
Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that.
It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws.
The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping.
To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.
If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.
It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...
But people don't want to listen to the harsh truths. They would rather consume their way out of the problem with electric cars, education for third world countries, reforestation, solar power and other false hopes.
I'm sorry but I think this crosses the line. I don't want to impose my morality on you but in my opinion me saying "most people should not have children" is not the same as basically telling people to kill themselves.
I understand that I am in the minority when I say this I think not conceiving children is not the same as telling people to kill themselves. I think people do not have a fundamental right to reproduction at the same level as they have the right to be left alive (which I think comes higher).
I'd much rather see most people not have children rather than they kill themselves.
irq11 does not consider the costs of implementing a world-wide child reduction policy. A combination of solutions including education, birth control, electric cars, reducing flying, solar energy etc. is FAR more realistic than the "no kids, no cars" approach. He complains about harsh reactions but he is the one who started this off from a very antagonistic perspective that everybody is just a mindless consumer while he is the arbiter of harsh truths that people are too weak-minded to admit to.
It’s not surprising at all (as I said, people don’t want to actually change their lives), but it does become a self-satire.
Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.
“You know how you were gonna have a second kid? Here’s a thought: consider using the time and money you’d spend on that to do something else. Like retire early.”
If we can’t convince people not to do an expensive, time-consuming, painful thing in order to help stop global warming, we really do have problems.
They've probably done more to combat global warming than most "ban cars/meat/flying" fanatics.
What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.
If you elect to have one fewer child, you can drive a car everywhere and fly first class for vacation and eat a big steak every week of your life, and you’ll still be greener than your neighbor with the solar panels and the Tesla. Doesn’t matter what birth rates are in the industrialized world.
Drive a Tesla and put solar panels on your house and eat vegan and shop local at the co-op. Knock yourself out. But the single guy next door with no kids who drives a muscle car and eats big red steaks every day is still doing more for global warming than you are. It’s not even a question.
"Educating Girls" and "Family Planning" are ranked 6th and 7th on the list (out of 80). So I don't know why you are saying that its midway down the list?
According to this logic the real number one thing you could do is to kill yourself, but it fails for exactly the same reason.
You're just measuring the impact and not the cost. Doing one thing with a large impact and an even larger cost is worse than doing three things whose total impact is more and total cost is less than that of the one thing. Especially since in this context they stack -- if you buy an electric car and switch to electric heat and install solar panels on your roof, but so too do your spouse and three kids, that's going to have more impact than having two kids while you're all driving ICE cars and getting heat from fuel oil and electricity from coal, since the impact of each measure is multiplied by each of the five people in your family.
On top of that, you're not considering the economic and political implications. If there are fewer children then there will be fewer working people per retiree. That means a resource crunch, which is exactly the sort of thing that will prevent people from being able to afford sustainable alternatives that may cost a little bit more, and then you've doomed us all.
However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.
It's the same result. You're just choosing it for yourself instead of your parents having chosen for you, which only seems fair -- I know I'd rather be the one to choose for myself. But the point is that the choice, in either case, is not worth the cost when there are better alternatives.
If we were at the point that population reduction was the only possible solution then we would be soliciting volunteers, but it's not.
> However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.
Why would anybody want to do that when it isn't necessary? You can't just buy an electric car and call it done, but it's one among a collection of things you can do that sum together to an actual solution that doesn't require people to abandon their standard of living.
Edit: choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like. You are making sure that the population doesn't keep increasing. Killing people on the other hand is population reduction. They're really not the same thing at all.
I don't think anybody wants to have the abortion debate right now, so let's not.
> choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like.
The fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate in developed countries, so having fewer children than the current baseline is a (further) population reduction.
I mean, a small-but-growing number of young adults are already doing exactly that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/some-millennials-climat...
https://qz.com/1590642/these-millennials-are-going-on-birth-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-americans-worry-...
> The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem,
I don't think that's true. People are trying to find better ways to solve the minimum amount of consumption they need to continue to exist. That's not the same thing as what you've described, that's not "consuming our way out".
People aren't buying EVs because they want to vacation all the time and/or take fun extra road trips 24/7. It's mainly about "I have to be able to get to Work/School/Home in a quick and safe manner, because capitalism demands it for my survival. How can I emit as little CO2 into the air as possible, while still meeting the requirements a capitalist nation demands of me. Which of these solutions can I afford?"
> it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.
Because many "first world" nation birthrates are already abstaining pretty significantly. In the US specifically, birthrates have fallen to all-time record lows - https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low...
The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before.
If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you can do to reduce climate change is suicide. And the most significant thing a nation can do is genocide.
The author acknowledges electric cars are a modest improvement.
And who is working on the better solution?
The article claims it is a problem of consumption, but yet also it's a systemic problem. You can't fix systemic problems from consumption choices, and blaming individual consumers for systemic problems misses the point entirely of: a) who is to blame, and b) who could fix it.
People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.
While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.
You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.
It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).
If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.
FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)
That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.
So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?
You only mentioned airports in your examples. America can't even build rail lines that go to airports!
Speaking of cherry picking, I think that referring to high-speed passenger train alone is an example thereof, especially as it ignores the large and successful American fright train infrastructure. California made the mistake of being too ambitious, a more modest plan from the start would have worked.
As for California, it's just CA, it's the whole country. Where's the high-speed rail in the northeast, where they have the highest density of people who would use such a system? It doesn't exist (and again, no, the Acela doesn't count). What about between Seattle and Portland? Why isn't the federal government involved, since this should be an interstate issue? This whole country is just a fucking disaster when it comes to public infrastructure.
Anyone who has been to Tokyo knows that you can survive without a car.
Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention.
I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention.
It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention.
It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.
Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?
With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).
Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.
Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.
This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)
In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.
> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.
We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/
That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.
He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.
Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence.
Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.
Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.
This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.
A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars. That’s more difficult given family needs etc. If I didn’t have to factor others’ needs, I would have done this already.
This is the point that I think the author is trying to make. Changes at the margin aren’t addressing the real problem - they’re treating the symptom, not the disease.
And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem. Suburban areas have a disproportionate carbon footprint specifically because of ICE-powered cars being required to go anywhere; if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint?
Hell, at that point the suburban areas could actually be net carbon sinks, given there's more room for big carbon-devouring trees in between single-family/duplex/quadruplex homes than there typically is between skyscrapers packed as tightly as possible (as is the norm in even small cities, let alone large ones).
The author very specifically points that out:
> ...our cars primarily exist to connect things, things that require immense extraction and fossil fuel energy to build, run and maintain: roads buildings factories shopping centres suburbs cities airports and so on. It is not just the car itself that is unsustainable; it is our entire way of life and the system that underpins it.
I can almost understand this for roads (but buses still need those, too!). Literally everything else is entirely orthogonal to cars or the lack thereof; abolishing cars entirely v. switching to electric-only would have zero impact there.
This is absurd. If people move away from the suburbs, the trees will still be there, and more if we get into reforestation. Building a suburb generally involves cutting down trees. Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.
Only for cities/suburbs that exist in forested areas. This would exclude most desert and prairie ecosystems (for example).
> Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.
Sure, mathematically-speaking, and planet-wide. On a more local scale, though, this is not necessarily the case.
There's also the consideration for relative density of CO₂ sources v. sinks. I don't have any actual data here, so feel free to ignore this, but my hypothesis is that urban areas would have significantly higher CO₂ densities than suburban areas (which would in turn have significantly higher densities than rural areas, and in turn wilderness areas), and this high-density CO₂ would not readily/easily/immediately disperse / would be more difficult for surrounding carbon-sink areas (like wilderness and - I'd argue - potentially suburban areas) to even receive, let alone absorb. You thus end up with big lingering blobs of CO₂, continuously fueled by human occupation, and unable to disperse. Spreading out humans would better spread that CO₂ sequestration load, thus allowing better efficiencies.
I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.
Counterpoint?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
This was in an area where (IIRC) the mandated minimum lot size was 1 acre, and the vast majority of properties were 5+ (I lived on 8).
There is an alternative. Lobby your city to relax zoning. Let someone replace one of the homes in your subdivision with a coffee shop/convenience store/pizza parlor. Things like that.
Your current built environment isn't perfect for perfectly sustainable living, but allowing it to grow organically in that direction is far more sustainable than abandoning it and building new cities.
I struggle with this as moving is most definitely giving up on my current "community" and lobbying would most definitely push me out of my comfort zone. But perhaps that's a good thing :)
This is exactly what I'm planning to do. However, for most Americans, it isn't a realistic choice, because it means you have to emigrate from America. There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.
There's almost no place in this country -that is affordable- where you can live without a car.
That's the real problem. Sure - there's NY or SF, which for the most part have the infrastructure to support most people's non-car needs. But only the very few can afford to live in either place. I know I couldn't afford it, unless I somehow could land a FAANG job (not likely at my age and education level). I can't even afford to live in the downtown area of the city I currently live "in" (Phoenix) - prices there have skyrocketed, mainly due to certain infrastructure transportation improvements and other things making downtown "the cool place" to live at (and conversely pushing out the artists and such who can't afford to live there any longer). Expensive loft apartments, existing urban housing in the historic parts (pricing gone thru the roof on those). It's crazy. So - out in the "suburbs" I stay (which isn't really the real suburbs any longer, since I'm in an older area that used to be "the edge" but no longer).
I like the design of that city more than, say Manhattan, which is another candidate.
To complete your metaphor and make it more accurate: we don't know exactly how far away the wall is. Reducing acceleration (emissions) is good unambiguously. If we reduce them fast enough, maybe our seatbelt and airbags will make the crash survivable.
> Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing
Yes, it absolutely does "care". It's not a black and white issue. Each fractional degree more of temperature increase causes dramatically more serious change to the environment. Every possible reduction is valuable.
I don't like your metaphor. Individually this may be enough to slow down for that tight hair pin. As a society each additional electric car is someone putting the brakes on some massive train, others may still be mashing the accelerator, but eventually the balance will tip.
Think about how long has it taken to get people to stop smoking. True, even now new young people continue to start up smoking. But overall, it is a massive improvement over the situation as it was 50 years ago. One person at a time, but coordinated from the top. This I think is how climate change will be solved. Very slowly, and it will never be completely eradicated.
That (almost-certainly-incorrectly) assumes that conventional engines will continue to grow in use forever despite electric vehicles continuing to decrease in price and increase in performance/versatility/diversity. At some point we'll see an inflection point, especially as charging stations continue to proliferate.
That is: just because electric cars ain't dominant marketshare-wise now doesn't mean they'll never be.
It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet still small enough for practical purposes.
For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system. The problem isn't the motors - it's the battery; you can't make one small enough with the same energy density as the diesel or gasoline those machines currently use.
That's merely one example, I can think of more, but I won't. The only way around any of this would be to change (fairly radically) how certain tasks are accomplished; For instance, if instead of such a machine with a single operator, you instead had a ton of smaller robotic machines digging or whatnot, all in some kind of conga line or bucket-brigade type system - and let it work overnight or be slower in some other manner - the same amount of work could potentially be done and stay all-electric. But - somebody will be losing a job in such a scenario...
These do exist, though, albeit in smaller form factors: http://www.sherpaminiloaders.com/eng/models/sherpa-100-eco/
Industrial applications like this tend to be more amenable to electric-only vehicles (even if those vehicles ultimately get their power from ICE generators on the job site) thanks to there being far less of a need to drive long distances on a single charge (and thus never having to be very far from a charger). Electric forklifts are pretty common, on that note.
----
But yes, I fully expect ICE vehicles will continue to exist for various specialized applications (and also because there are a lot of them driving around right now). They just don't need to be anywhere near the majority of vehicles in operation.
In a sense, this conversation mirrors the myopia the article talks about, because people who disagree with it are defending their individual consumption choices, while ignoring the broader social and policy connections that surround them.
First, can you not buy an electric car and advocate and enact organizational or systematic change? They’re not mutually exclusive.
Second, how do dynamic systems composed of many independent, self-directed agents change? Instantaneously or over some period of time? How long is that period of time? Probably much longer a period of time than it takes to purchase an electric vehicle (< 1 minute) and reduce your emissions immediately.
They’re not mutually exclusive.
So if for example the government spends $$$$ to put an EV charging point in every street light, that's $$$$ they didn't spend making busses more appealing.
* Deliver me from point A to point G without stopping at B, C, D, E, and F along the way
* Provide room for more than a handful of cargo/luggage and park / wait around while I load/unload it
* Actually stick to a goddamn timetable (looking at you, Muni)
Then no amount of money will make buses more appealing to me than a car.
Trains have these same problems, minus the inconsistent timetables, and have the added benefit of typically going at least a little bit faster.
And perhaps it won't, if enough of the people that make it up read articles like this to ignore the very powerful automotive lobby
I mean after about a decade I finally gave in and bought a used TV (instead of using a PC monitor). I already don't fly to useless tech conferences, and work remotely (so no mindless daily commute).
And eventually when the e-charger network will become widespread enough around here, I guess, I'll buy a used EV instead of the current car, because cities can't ban these smoke machines fast enough.
And when the choice is presented I already buy local stuff.
But.. this is a luxury for me/us, because of the enormous income inequality bonus of IT/tech.
Those who already live on the edge won't pick the local things, they will pick the cheapest one. And the way to make the GHG-friendly stuff cheap is to tax the shit out of the GHG-positive things.
And that unfortunately seems like a pretty hard challenge, thanks to our wonderful society favoring chauvinists rhetoric, trade wars, nationalist triades, and other bullshit.
So, yes, in terms of the big picture EVs don't matter much, but without even presenting an alternative, it'll be quite impossible to persuade the other half of society.
Making everything more expensive is a political dead-end, and would exacerbate income inequality.
Taxing stuff that comes from large scale industrial destruction of the environment is completely different than everything.
Plus all the carbon tax schemes start with direct rebates to the tax payers in equal parts, so those who consume more get less back than those who don't.
Whoa there! These engines are indeed not optimized for emissions like NOx and particulates, but they are impressively efficient. I believe that a good deal less CO2 is emitted shipping a container across the ocean than would be spent driving it across the country.
Anyhow, the economic solution here is clear: a carbon tax that applies to imports. The serious proposals do this.
In fact, everything I know suggests the opposite - environmental engagement is always a positive feedback loop.
Why would most people do that when they can get a used car cheaper or keep driving what they have. It is just expensive (i am not saying i would not like a Nissian LEAF, that would be sweet).
I guess i see people buying EV's and ask why the rest of the world is not (i know you are not asking this, but a lot of comments i read are) when we cannot afford them.
I wouldn’t have bought the LEAF new either if it weren’t for the $10K in government cheese that came with it. (I can buy a $32K car; I just choose not to as it seems a waste.)
I have seen far too many examples of self declared communists saying things like a $20/hr minimum wage is bad thing because it distracts from overthrowing "the oppressor".
It's failing hardest in the developing world because do you really expect people in Africa, South America, and Asia to listen to rich Westerners guilt trip them into not doing what those same rich Westerners are doing? "To save the planet we need you to stay poor." The response is a predictable "fuck you."
There are only two possible futures:
1. We develop ways of running our civilization in a more sustainable way. This is a huge multifaceted roll up your sleeves engineering problem. Electric cars are a huge piece because they break a big part of our hard dependence on carbon based energy and free us to substitute other things. Anything that gets hot, blows, flows, or shines can make electricity, while ICE cars only run on petroleum. No, it is not enough, but the way you do things like this is piece by piece.
2. We adapt to climate change and other major environmental problems as they unfold.
Some world where people stop wanting transport and air conditioning and such is as realistic as the one where teens dont have sex.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that this is an engineering problem not a moral problem. Environmentalists have treated it as a moral problem for 50 years and this has accomplished nothing at all. It reminds me a lot of the drug war.
Edit #2: I also see a similarity in the human reaction. When you shame teens about sex they still have sex but they hide it. Shame people about industry and they outsource it all to China, in other words hide it.
I disagree. I think the argument that's being made is rather that switching to electric cars isn't enough, but people focus on it so heavily that people feel as though switching to an electric car is saving the planet. The problem here is that it's not enough and due to how hyped up electric cars are there won't be enough will left to tackle many other problems that affect climate change.
I don't know if I came across properly, so I'll explain it in a different way: humans have a limited amount of attention and will. Switching to electric cars is a useful move to combat climate change, but due to how hyped up electric cars are, it will satisfy many people's urge to do something for the climate. This occupies most of the limited amount of attention and will, thus there isn't enough left over to tackle all the other, bigger, problems.
Nobody said "buy an electric car, and you are done, the planet would be saved". And if some people do believe that, then it is an education issue, not an electric car issue.
A bit tired of people shooting for perfection and berating those who actually try to make a difference, even so slightly.
Maybe a more effective solution would be to ban any fossil fuel powered large ships and planes ("the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars." http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...). And yet we all know this is not going to happen anytime soon... and still we would keep getting blog posts saying that electric cars are a problem (of hype or whatever) for the environment.
It's irrelevant what people said. What matters is what people believe.
>A bit tired of people shooting for perfection and berating those who actually try to make a difference, even so slightly.
The problem here is that you only have a limited amount of attention from people to spend on trying to improve climate change. If you misspend it, even when your proposed solution helps, you won't deal with the problem.
Imagine you're in a desert with a jug of water. You know the direction you have to go in to get to a city and be saved. You can choose to walk or crawl. If you pick the option to crawl then you're moving in the right direction, but you'll die of thirst before you get there, because you have a limited amount of water. People's attention and will are like that jug of water. You need to make the best of it. Electric cars are great, but people need to understand that that isn't all that needs to be done.
And let's find a way to get rid of all large (fossil fuel powered) ships/planes and coal/gas power plants polluting way more than all cars combined.
All that hair splitting about electric cars is just noise.
All of what you said is what needs to be done (and more), so we should use rhetoric that acknowledges that cars are only a part of the problem.
- Energy saving appliances (LED lights) [Mostly a checkmark; done]
- Vegetarianism / local, sustainable, slow food [Growing trend]
- Electric vehicle [Current fight]
That's mostly it from an average individual's day to day carbon footprint. After that you might argue over things like flight patterns and cruise ship carbon, but those are less day-to-day and more infrequent and start to get into "nice to have" easily interchangeable work/vacation/models.
The article is correct that there are greater systemic issues to solve. Sure, it would be great to bring back more public transportation, (re-)build better more walkable cities, better deal with the environmental externalities of our many industries, etc. But we aren't going to push the scales on those without collective effort, real political policy decisions, and probably regulation and taxes. We aren't going to correct these things on "many people's urge to do something" at an individual level, and focusing on it heavily isn't what's exhausting or will exhaust individuals from bigger problems, focusing on it only being an individual effort crisis is distracting us from dealing with bigger problems.
This isn't a problem solvable from consumption alone and it is well past time we stopped pretending it is. It's a political problem we keep pretending the markets will solve because the markets own the politicians and that's what they want the politicians to tell the people.
People have plenty of attention for the things they care about. What they don't have is the ability to change much at all about the bigger problems
It's not enough it's worse : basically by buying an electric car you're outsourcing your pollution to China and Africa.
There are unfortunately still many, many people, who—even if they accept that human caused climate change is real—do not appreciate how urgent the crisis is.
I am one of these people. How urgent is it? Between the denials and exaggerations, I really can't tell.
So he's not trying to argue for a total solution or no solution. He's arguing that the proposed solution is actually part of the problem, and that it is not a solution because it is part of the problem, not because it is a partial solution.
You, and others in this thread, are saying that electric cars are a small step towards a solution to climate change, even though it is not a complete solution. However, any solution to climate change, partial or complete, needs a reduction to our greenhouse gas emissions and electric cars do not achieve such a reduction (to CO₂ specifically).
That's because having only a few people buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ emissions given that everyone else keeps buying more and more normal, dirty cars; and having everyone buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ because then we have enough electric cars that we are still emitting more than we can afford to.
I'm not sure about that, some of my neighbours seem to think that giving up plastic bags is enough to offset their annual holiday in Bali.
It's just the way it is, lamenting the sinful human nature doesn't change a thing. We need meaningful regulation.
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BEVs are clearly the future, and offer opportunities for distributed storage and demand dispatch that will help us keep the grid stable even with high renewable mixes. They're going to be great in the future, and for that we need to build up a market for them. That's where the real difference will come from.
When storage at scale is the hard part and electric car batteries can power a house for a few days? Not to mention that the transportation sector is a part of the grid fundamentally. Even if it interferes with one metric it is still better overall which makes the complaint seem like it misses the point.
In the long term, once you're generating so much renewable energy that it's causing instability in the grid and you can't pump more in, BEVs are a probably an essential component of handling that.
Certain grids at certain times have already reached this point (the SA battery being a great example of where BEVs could have helped), but most are many years away from it, depending on how the price of solar trends.
if we use the electric car as a way to persuade ourselves
that our 'way of life' is safe if only we all switched to
electric vehicles then we are ignoring the elephant in
the room
I'm genuinely asking for sources because I don't know of anyone that is pushing electric cars as the solution. Not Tesla, nor people who buy Teslas, nor people who buy electric cars.
I want sources because all I can do is speak about the individuals I've come across. In my life, some of the people that have bought electric vehicles also:
- Advocate in local government for bike lane buildout in their cities.
- Adopt vegetarian or vegan diets.
- Ask their employers to buy carbon offsets for any work-related flights.
- Push schools, hospitals, governments, apartment complexes, etc. to transition what they can to solar or wind energy. (My brother's HS didn't have solar panels, now they have solar+batteries providing some X% of their energy needs.)
The list goes on.
Yes, I agree with the author, electric vehicles aren't the full solution. No, I don't agree that they're a talisman of false hope. That's pretty strong, inflammatory wording. And no, I don't agree with the author's decision to set his article in a negative framing. To me, that does more to invite analysis paralysis than a positive framing would.
If he (or anyone) knows a better route, then please offer CTA for a program where individuals can pay $X for a guaranteed Y benefit towards addressing climate change. Electric vehicles offer exactly that CTA. Why didn't the author?
Building a new (electric) car also produces emissions. It may be that we produce less emissions overall by continuing to use existing cars.
In France for sure : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
in China I don't think so : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China ...however local pollution is zero so that's huge benefit for large cities of course.
I read the article and didn't get that impression at all.
I got: electric cars are an improvement, but don't fundamentally solve the problem.
Oversimplistic view, you have a stake in Tesla or you don't know better. Otherwise you would also discuss the TCO, the total power need to produce e-vehicles, where Lithium is harvested and under what circumstances, that increased electricity demand fuels the discussion about nuclear power plants. And many more points to consider which certainly don't give a 100% conclusive picture in favor of e-mobility.
This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect.
His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”.
I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.
Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.
Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.