Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020

Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by rakoo on Monday January 25, 2021 @04:10AM (#25901102)

Call me cynical but climate change, the biggest threat to mankind right is right in front of us. We will also face the biggest threat to what made our civilization and our democracy possible, which is cheap quasi-unlimited access to energy (petrol in our case). Combine both and I don't see democracies as being able to efficiently navigate us out of this combined nightmare to come.

As you said, autocracies are efficient for hard problems, and we're going to face the hardest very soon

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by eecc on Monday January 25, 2021 @04:49AM (#25901365)

Not necessarily. Autocracies don’t self-correct when it’s needed: dissent is not tolerated and dissenters are automatically out-group and dealt with accordingly.

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by jacquesm on Monday January 25, 2021 @05:22AM (#25901606)

I can see a very bad version of the trolley problem in our future. Do we let go of capitalism and democracy for a while in order to save the species or do we hang on to them and possibly lose it all? Autocracy can always be gotten rid of at some point, at least, you'd hope. With present day tech it might be a ratchet that once it clicks will not get reversed.

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by ctdonath on Monday January 25, 2021 @07:35AM (#25902428)

1°C rise per century.

1 foot ocean rise per century.

Threat?

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by MagnumOpus on Monday January 25, 2021 @08:15AM (#25902756)

Unmitigated, the forecasts are around 5°C in this century.

Unimitigated, the forecasts are around 3-7 feet sea level rise this century.

Both of these massively increase the probability of non linear disasters including the release of methane from permafrost and ocean floors, or the disruption of the Gulf stream which would disrupt global agriculture even worse than a 5 degree temperature rise.

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by rakoo on Monday January 25, 2021 @10:39AM (#25904404)

There is no indication that problems are going to be linear related to temperature increase. Maybe it will be twice worse, maybe 20 times worse, who knows.

Among the many problems, you can expect heat to be so hot that 1 billion people will be living in a place where it's not physically possible to live (humidity doesn't allow the body to cool down): https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/05/04/world-he.... It won't exactly be all roses to the other billions too

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by mcv on Monday January 25, 2021 @08:27AM (#25902858)

Could be a meter this century. And if temperature keeps rising, glaciers will only melt faster. But that's just the sea level; there's also changing weather patterns, disrupted ecological systems, more powerful hurricanes.

It's absolutely a bigger threat than the terrorism that everybody was so eager to throw away their freedom for 19 years ago.

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by ctdonath on Monday January 25, 2021 @09:52PM (#25911856)

I’ve followed the “threat” for half of the hundred years everything was to get terrible in. We’re >20% through the 21st Century.

Got better, actually.

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by mcv on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @07:03AM (#25914846)

I have trouble understanding what you're trying to say. You traveled 50 years into the future?

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Re:Sales of electric cars up by 43% in 2020 by lumberingjack on Monday January 25, 2021 @08:49AM (#25903038)

Everything's freezing again all the glaciers are growing again, climate change models predict next 50 years are going to be some of the coldest in a very long time..... threat?

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