> Electric vehicles tend to produce fewer emissions over their life cycles than equivalent vehicles powered by fossil fuels, but the framing often used by government and industry that they are "zero emissions" is misleading.
> Unlike a conventional vehicle whose emissions come from burning fossil fuels, a greater share of an EV's emissions come from its production; more specifically, its battery. This is the side of the EV that often doesn't make it into the ad campaigns.
while no greenhouse gas emissions directly come from EVs, they run on electricity that is, in large part, still produced from fossil fuels in many parts of the world.
Thats the real side that doesnt make it into the ad campaigns (and yes, Canada is one of the better countries out there for Energy mix)
Even if they ran entirely on solar, cars still pollute. Dust from your tires, for instance, has a noticable impact the fish populations. Electric cars are heavy and put more strain on roads. Battery chemistry can be difficult to cleanly recycle.
EVs are great, and I'd love to see them replace ICE cars, but they are not enough. We need to rethink our dependence on the car.
> EVs are great, and I'd love to see them replace ICE cars, but they are not enough. We need to rethink our dependence on the car.
Isn't it telling when the defacto figure head of EV is forcing people back into the office while jet-setting around the World on his own private jet, and having more kids as time goes on if if EV alone were real issue? It's a total lack of conviction to actually disrupt the status quo from which they benefit from.
This article [0] outlines what really works rather well: economic incentives. Anything else is PR and window dressing.
If tech really wants to do something that matters to that end, it's not biyung a P100 S, they should really reflect on whether building or maintaining another CRUD for a 100K+ really matters at all? And what they could help build to incentivize and advance WFH from tools so that more Industry can transition out of that system in order to reduce and curb unnecessary emissions of GHG.
Obviously you cannot transition everything to WFH, but just focusing on the amount that was during COVID would be enough to offset a lot of the problem.
Everything else seems to be getting there, it is getting close to it solving a lot of the issues if we put the right incentives in place and the only real impediment seems to be political which is tied to propping up needless business models that only contribute to this problem to the detriment of everyone on this Planet.
> This article [0] outlines what really works rather well
This article really sums up the solution - consume less than you generate - get your 100k car, and spend an extra 10k on a roof of solar panels and then you are really doing your bit for the planet.
> This article really sums up the solution - consume less than you generate - get your 100k car, and spend an extra 10k on a roof of solar panels and then you are really doing your bit for the planet.
You're not seeing the forest from the trees, I'm focused on the fact that a life-time of conditioning of austere-like consumption habits can be undone when the financial incentives have significantly changed.
Buying an EV is a discretionary purchase and I have no opinion on why or why not someone would need one; but it's the fact that Human's are unlikely to accept a paradigm shift unless they have a compelling reason to do so beyond 'you're killing the Planet' rhetoric; it falls on deaf ears and breeds apathy anything else is quickly swept under the rug and business as usual continues.
Even so, power plants are massively more efficient than any combustion engine, even taking transmission losses into account, so it’s still a net gain.
Additionally, EVs become more clean along with the grid they’re connected to, whereas ICE vehicles will forever be as dirty as they were the day they rolled off the lot.
Still, centralizing the energy production is an architectural win that is well worth the effort put into refactoring. It decouples the devices from the means of energy production, making it easier to swap that out later. It’s basically branch-by-abstraction:
I'm curious what's going to happen with the existing suburbs. Normalisation of remote work already permanently killed some commute. But a lot of American suburbs won't be usable without a car without massive changes. Before you can cycle to the shop / school, there's a lot of houses that would have to go down.
Also particulates from car tires eroding against all the asphalt. (All the asphalt and other pavement is also an environmental concern.)
We're going to have to reconfigure some pretty basic aspects of our civilization if we want to prevent environmental disasters, and this goes beyond climate change.
Too many birds crash against our windows.
Too many earthworms die on sidewalks when it rains.
We use too many toxic chemicals, we waste too much energy and food and water.
We can change all of this. We can live in ecological harmony and improve our standard of living at the same time.
Rebuilding infrastructure across a country the size of US to be non-car centric is going to release far more CO2 than EVs ever will.
It's not just laying train tracks everywhere, you have to tear down and rebuild housing to be more dense, streets to be more walkable and bikeable, and all the according infra such as electricity, internet cables, water pipes and anything else you can imagine to support the new public-transport friendly layout.
It's a mind-bogglingly expensive enterprise compared to replacing ICE vehicles with EVs.
There's also no reason at all why these 2 processes can't be happening simultaneously, in places where it makes sense. By presenting the argument through a false dichotomy, you're just alienating people from each other. But hey, that's modern journalism!
The self feeding cycle we have now is: science advances -> more energy production -> higher gdp -> more environment destruction + population growth.
The solutions proposed so far is to produce more, do more science, create more green jobs etc. we all know that this doing “more” won’t work but we are scared to lose our jobs or funding etc. So we have these pseudo intellectual-socio-scientific discourse trying to “solve” the problem but all the while we are just digging our graves deeper. To fix the problem we just need to rip that bandaid quickly and ruthlessly. This will cause economies to fall, governments to fail and wars to be waged. Good luck getting this through - the proponents already know all this, they are just making money while the sun shines organizing conferences and marketing their pet funding projects.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 39.8 ms ] thread> Unlike a conventional vehicle whose emissions come from burning fossil fuels, a greater share of an EV's emissions come from its production; more specifically, its battery. This is the side of the EV that often doesn't make it into the ad campaigns.
while no greenhouse gas emissions directly come from EVs, they run on electricity that is, in large part, still produced from fossil fuels in many parts of the world.
Thats the real side that doesnt make it into the ad campaigns (and yes, Canada is one of the better countries out there for Energy mix)
EVs are great, and I'd love to see them replace ICE cars, but they are not enough. We need to rethink our dependence on the car.
Isn't it telling when the defacto figure head of EV is forcing people back into the office while jet-setting around the World on his own private jet, and having more kids as time goes on if if EV alone were real issue? It's a total lack of conviction to actually disrupt the status quo from which they benefit from.
This article [0] outlines what really works rather well: economic incentives. Anything else is PR and window dressing.
If tech really wants to do something that matters to that end, it's not biyung a P100 S, they should really reflect on whether building or maintaining another CRUD for a 100K+ really matters at all? And what they could help build to incentivize and advance WFH from tools so that more Industry can transition out of that system in order to reduce and curb unnecessary emissions of GHG.
Obviously you cannot transition everything to WFH, but just focusing on the amount that was during COVID would be enough to offset a lot of the problem.
Everything else seems to be getting there, it is getting close to it solving a lot of the issues if we put the right incentives in place and the only real impediment seems to be political which is tied to propping up needless business models that only contribute to this problem to the detriment of everyone on this Planet.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32284453
This article really sums up the solution - consume less than you generate - get your 100k car, and spend an extra 10k on a roof of solar panels and then you are really doing your bit for the planet.
You're not seeing the forest from the trees, I'm focused on the fact that a life-time of conditioning of austere-like consumption habits can be undone when the financial incentives have significantly changed.
Buying an EV is a discretionary purchase and I have no opinion on why or why not someone would need one; but it's the fact that Human's are unlikely to accept a paradigm shift unless they have a compelling reason to do so beyond 'you're killing the Planet' rhetoric; it falls on deaf ears and breeds apathy anything else is quickly swept under the rug and business as usual continues.
Additionally, EVs become more clean along with the grid they’re connected to, whereas ICE vehicles will forever be as dirty as they were the day they rolled off the lot.
https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/BranchByAbstraction.html
We're going to have to reconfigure some pretty basic aspects of our civilization if we want to prevent environmental disasters, and this goes beyond climate change.
Too many birds crash against our windows.
Too many earthworms die on sidewalks when it rains.
We use too many toxic chemicals, we waste too much energy and food and water.
We can change all of this. We can live in ecological harmony and improve our standard of living at the same time.
Have you tasted it?
It's not just laying train tracks everywhere, you have to tear down and rebuild housing to be more dense, streets to be more walkable and bikeable, and all the according infra such as electricity, internet cables, water pipes and anything else you can imagine to support the new public-transport friendly layout.
It's a mind-bogglingly expensive enterprise compared to replacing ICE vehicles with EVs.
There's also no reason at all why these 2 processes can't be happening simultaneously, in places where it makes sense. By presenting the argument through a false dichotomy, you're just alienating people from each other. But hey, that's modern journalism!
The solutions proposed so far is to produce more, do more science, create more green jobs etc. we all know that this doing “more” won’t work but we are scared to lose our jobs or funding etc. So we have these pseudo intellectual-socio-scientific discourse trying to “solve” the problem but all the while we are just digging our graves deeper. To fix the problem we just need to rip that bandaid quickly and ruthlessly. This will cause economies to fall, governments to fail and wars to be waged. Good luck getting this through - the proponents already know all this, they are just making money while the sun shines organizing conferences and marketing their pet funding projects.