That's an interesting point.

We see this a couple of times a year in the United States — tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people evacuating because of an approaching hurricane.

It takes hours and hours and hours to go not very far. And when you finally get someplace with an open hotel room, it's hundreds of miles away.

Although I believe they are close, I'm not sure EVs are ready for that challenge yet. Especially since a gas station half-way to safety can fill up hundreds of cars faster than a dozen EVs can charge.

Can more chargers solve this problem? Better chargers? Both? Something else?

Logistics. A petrol station can fill up any single isolated car or truck really fast, but when the local supply is gone, it can only be returned via a delivery truck (unless I'm very wrong and they have pipes direct to refineries?)

An electric charger can recharge one car battery much slower than a tank can be refilled, but the grid can be approximated as "not running out" over that kind of timescale.

I'm not sure which would be better for mass evacuations in practice, especially given traffic jams are where EVs excel.

Having wireless tech that can charge that fast would be even better. Maybe get on a little conveyer belt similar to an automated carwash and by the time you exit, you have 50 more miles than before. Hell, imagine these things running parallel to a road like a pit lane on a racetrack. Move on the track for 5 minutes, then they turn around and grab cars going the opposite direction.

Seems pretty inefficient and probably a logistical nightmare, but it would be cool to see it work!

Now doing this in a portable way is the difficult part. There are a few trucks now that can do 7-10 kW output to charge cars, but that's only about 30-40 miles of range per hour, which is still quite slow. But it might be enough to top you up for 15-20 mins to get you 10-15 miles down the road to a charger. I imagine this will improve though quite a bit as more EVs are adopted. I think if we can get to 50 kW chargers from service vehicles that's good enough. On a 50 kW charger 15 minutes of charging will give you 50 miles of range on a Tesla, and on less efficient cars it will still give you at 30+ miles.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...

There's basically three options: overhead lines, which are cheap but kind of ugly and don't really work for passenger cars (they'd need a really tall pantograph to reach as high as a truck), rails embedded in the road surface which can be used by cars and trucks but are more expensive than overhead lines, and wireless charging which is much more expensive than rails and the amount of power you can reasonably transfer is pretty limited.

I'm in favor of the rail approach, like they're testing in Sweden. If some billionaire with money burning a hole in your pocket is reading this, might I suggest buying a stretch of land parallel to a busy highway and constructing a parallel road with rail-style charging, and establish an in-motion charging standard. Let people charge for free and see what comes of it.

In the long run I hope all the major highways get electrified this way. It's disappointing that Congress isn't already working on this.

I don't have a Tesla, but maybe someone here does and can chime in.

If you want EVs to take over, get feature parity with the current technology.

[1] https://www.autotrader.ca/editorial/20190201/how-long-can-yo...

Realistically, that's an extreme case and some ICE vehicles might break down too for whatever reason. In that situation if there's no other option you'd probably just ditch your car and get a ride from someone else.

I don't know if battery heaters are a common feature on current EVs. I'd think it would be particularly useful for LFP cells, which can be damaged if you try to charge them when they're below freezing. They can be discharged safely (if not efficiently) at much lower temperatures, which means you could "bootstrap" the car in cold weather by using the battery to heat itself until it gets warm enough to charge (without which you can't use regenerative braking).

It wouldn't be that far-fetched to imagine a battery cell with a built-in heating element (e.g. an internal 1 ohm resistor across the battery terminals) that, when activated, keeps the cell at at least room temperature and shuts off when the battery gets up to temperature. Normally you'd only activate the heater when charging or driving.

Although maybe that's not right... if a large amount of energy is "lost" when the battery is too cold, that energy has to go somewhere. If it ends up as heat anyways, maybe it's really functionally equivalent to having a heating element in the cell. In which case the solution is probably just to insulate the batteries better.

Temperature change needed for complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: between 1 and 4 °C. (That's a change by, not a change to).

Effect of complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: 7.2 meter sea level rise.

Your attempt at nit picking, if it were valid, would actually makes it much worse: a temperature increase sufficient to turn "-22c" into "we don't need to worry about cold batteries" requires close to double the difference between today and the highest estimated average global temperature ever in the biological history of the planet, and that temperature happened before trees had evolved.

For example, naïvely adding 22 C (22.5 says Wiki) to the average so that the coldest was no longer below freezing, your Fort McMurray would have a new July average high of 46.2 C, which is above the current average of Death Valley 10 months of the year and pretty close the other two.

If people want to live in remote areas and pollute a ton, that's just fine as long as they pay to clean up the mess they make for everyone else. Direct carbon capture from the air is about $500/ton right now, which is only about $5/gallon of gas.

Well... if you want lumber, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and food, then you too will need people living "in remote areas".

But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.

Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable product after doing so.

Life is complicated and easy answers are often wrong.

Seems more like this kind of take is an attempt to canonize them.

They're economic actors. Their work is very important, but that's why they, you know, take money in exchange for their output.

Excusing externalities is how we get corporate structures where officers and shareholders are richly rewarded and tax payers get to pay for (and often live in) the SuperFund site after the company leaves.

I'm generally anti-carbon tax because it's the solution to the problem that is obvious, simple, and wrong. But when there are no other solutions, charging for cleanup is the way to go.

Farmers and miners pay for their costs. They can continue to do so and pass their costs on. Some farmers, at least in the US, we massively subsidize to a ridiculous extent in a make-work program for massive amounts of soy and corn. But this is an economic choice that is relatively recent in the history of the US, and we can decide at any moment to improve the efficiency of the economy by making externalized costs internal.

So a carbon tax on electricity generation sources works ok to incentivize a switch and internalize the externalities, but it's pretty equivalent to the general ITC/PTC subsidies that have recently been passed, with the exception that they are sector specific.

An economy wide carbon tax does almost nothing to incentivize decarbonization of steel or concrete, as the tech isn't there, nobody has spare money to invest in a solution, and the tax wouldn't necessarily increase the price of end products much. They need very specific industrial policy in these sectors to develop alternatives and put them into production.

Finally a carbon tax creates an entirely unified political coalition, across many sectors of the economy, to oppose the tax. So setting the tax at a level that is right to incentivize change is guaranteed to be nearly impossible, because od the breadth and political strength of the opposition to it. Specific carrots and sticks for each sector are what can drive real change in each sector.

If it was 1980, I'd be supporting a carbon tax. But we need to move far more quickly now to change our economic production systems than a carbon tax could ever conceivably achieve.

I can't think of a case where exempting some group from a carbon tax would be good policy. There is a pretty good argument though that a carbon tax would be regressive, and probably should be compensated for in some way so that poor people don't come out worse off, such as by reducing income tax in the lower brackets.

I think the hardest sector to decarbonize is going to be the military (with the exception of some small percentage of navy ships that are nuclear powered). I could see plug-in hybrid army vehicles eventually being a thing, though. Being able to run off of either diesel or electricity provides a lot of logistical flexibility. You can save the petroleum for when you really need to move long distances.

This is an easily solved problem. Just stop eating. Once you stop eating, then we don't have to have farmers and their remotely-located support communities growing food for you.

For bonus points, stop using computers. Electronics are made up of all kinds of metals that are mined in remote locations. So, stop using electricity at all, if you're really concerned about this.

And while you're at it, give up toilet paper. It comes from trees that are waaaay out in the forest. If you stop wiping, then we don't have to truck trees to paper mills to make toilet paper for people in the city to use.

Do your part.

  Sometimes population density is the defining concern,
  in other cases it is geographic isolation.  Small population
  size typically characterizes a rural place, but how small is
  rural? Population thresholds used to differentiate rural and
  urban communities range from 2,500 up to 50,000, depending on
  the definition.