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Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by babypuncher on Monday April 11, 2022 @12:29PM (#30991126)
The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus, etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the associated traffic.

We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.

Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by JumpCrisscross on Monday April 11, 2022 @12:34PM (#30991230)
> We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly

Sure. That doesn’t make EVs a “short term solution”. This is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era greens to oppose nuclear power. It’s not nukes or windmills, it’s nukes or coal.

Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by ncmncm on Monday April 11, 2022 @06:18PM (#30995835)
No. It really is nukes or wind turbines.

Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't.

Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could.

This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.

Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @09:25AM (#31002368)
> Nobody is building coal plants

Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines.

Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...

Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by ncmncm on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @11:00PM (#31010745)
States that shut down nukes burn more fossil fuel after.

States that build new nukes instead of solar and wind also spend on fossil fuel for all the years until their nukes are done. When the nukes are finally done (if ever), they displace a lot less fossil fuel than the solar and wind would have, for the money.

Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla... by Ekaros on Monday April 11, 2022 @02:21PM (#30992646)
Or in general with smaller cheaper, lighter vehicles. We should aim to build society where we don't need private vehicles for intercity transport. And then intracity we have electric bicycles or very small vehicles outside specific use cases.