I was more optimistic about EVs until I learned about the amount of CO2 produced by electricity generation in countris like Germany.
nuclear energy has been largely phased down for political reasons and CO2 emissions are still on a level where EVs might not be much cleaner in comparison, see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- aggregate efficiency lost to going to refueling stations
- decreased efficiency over the life span of the vehicle
EV cars have a few key efficiencies
- able to regenerate power on braking (a HUGE amount, and also why hybrid cars last so long)
- longer lifespan of vehicle and drive train (EVs are significantly more reliable, and the lack of moving parts means that wear takes quite a lot longer). an example of this in practice is the significantly better reliability of hybrid cars, which reduce hours on the ICE engine with batteries to great benefit
and we haven't even unlocked all of the benefits, battery density, and recycling stories available for EVs that will propel them further.
The key deficiencies for EVs right now are
- cost - this has been going down over time, EVs are still firmly in the luxury segment, although we will likely see a new sub-$25k EV with reasonable mileage by the end of the decade
- battery pollution - mining the batteries is bad, there is no way around it. battery recycling is a new technology and will be crucial for EVs in the future, both for cost reasons, but also pollution
- tire pollution - the heavy weight of EVs leads to high particulate matter of rubber, but this is also something that is being actively worked on. It also increases load wear, but new battery tech will help mitigate this.
- power grid - high ev saturation will overload the powergrid, although this is greatly mitigated by solar banking and low peak charging. This might be one of the hardest things to overcome, as it requires significant public spending, but it's not hopeless at all.
No matter which way you look at it, EVs are the future, but there are still lots of issues to be worked on.
Not just regenerate power on braking, but regenerative braking also means fewer consumables in the form of brake pads. Which, interestingly, the dust from pads is third after tires which is second to the ICE engine.
The other thing we've still haven't had enough time to fully discover is how much individual cells wear out and the big picture of the economics of swapping out only the individual cell that's bad. There's already been some practical work doing that, I'm just not aware of any longitudinal studies about it.
Yes, but it is still a better situation to be in because then when you do start to moving toward renewables (which seems almost inevitable with the lowering costs of solar and batteries (battery improvements largely coming from EV development(?))) it will have more impact.
EV's also have some other side benefits, like less noise (noise pollution is a real thing) and less air pollution (tires and asphalt are also a large part of car related air pollution).
Less air polution in cities will be an amazing change, I think people underestimate it since they either don't live in it or they are used to it. Countless studies regale the impact of local car polution on citizens. That EVs produce none while stopped in traffic, and significantly less overall is amazing, especially in the denser parts of a city.
Anecdotally whenever I return home from time out in rural Australia, it takes me a while to adjust to the air pollution while near roads, and we have some of the cleanest air of any city.
Germany is showing 543 gCO₂eq/kWh. A gallon of gasoline is 8887 grams/gallon. Add 40% to account for refining & transporting the gas to the gas station.
Here is a map produced with data from the Union of Concerned Scientists that shows the MPG equivalent in terms of CO2 in various US locations based on their power grid mix as of 2019. (Coal percentages have been dropping noticably even since then.)
this is a tool that UCS makes available to give you a mpg equivalent for a particular EV in a particular zip code based on the same data.
https://evtool.ucsusa.org/
Besides the fact that the grid has gotten cleaner, EV's have gotten more efficient and their manufacturing has gotten cleaner as a side effect of them getting cheaper.
That is just one part of the same legacy technology problem. As part of moving away from fossil fuels in general, we want to electrify transport and transform the grid to renewables or greener alternatives to fossil fuels.
Not everywhere is doing well at the second part of the problem, but Germany's grid is already at 30% renewables, and has time to transform toward renewables while we attempt to electrify the vehicles.
You can also shortcut the process if you own a house, by putting solar on your roof and charging from that. Places like California and South Australia have immense deployments of rooftop solar generation that have rocketed the states toward their renewables goals. South Australia generates over 70% of it's power from renewables. It went from 1% renewable to 70%+ in just 15 years.
This is bullshit and you know it. Politicians have been incredibly slow to accept the reality of climate change because they depend on oil dollars. Oil companies have spent 40 years spreading misinformation to mislead people on this issue because they knew very well that a fixing this problem would lead to reduced profits for them. They bought politicians to block proposals, pushed the least effective solutions when blocking it became infeasible. Politicians with any meaningful power have been squarely on the side of the oil companies in this, and that's why so little has been done these past 40 years.
The rational arguments warning us about global warming and climate change go back more than 100 years. Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) wrote an article in 1908 where he explained why burning oil would eventually lead to global warming. Because scientists already knew how this worked over 100 years ago. Politicians have only very recently been coming to grips with this, and even then extremely reluctantly, because they know it will hurt their powerful oil buddies.
Statements like that are not leading to fruitful discussions and signals of you as not very intelligent person. I suggest to stay away from it.
> Politicians have been incredibly slow to accept the reality of climate change because they depend on oil dollars.
That's very primitive state of facts. While it is certainly true in many cases, industry changes imposed by "climate change" lobby are resulting in huge redistribution of wealth. Companies and countries who benefit from that certainly incentivise the process and lobbyists. So you are right - but that's only part of the picture.
> The rational arguments warning us about global warming and climate change go back more than 100 years
To the best of our knowledge, climate change happens on this planet for all time of its existence. How much human activity contributes to that is something extremely difficult to measure and understand.
> Statements like that are not leading to fruitful discussions and signals of you as not very intelligent person. I suggest to stay away from it.
Normally yes, but not in this case. You were repeating a nonsense conspiracy theory that's completely detached from reality. That is something that signals you as a not very intelligent person, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.
> That's very primitive state of facts.
Facts nonetheless. You try to present it as if politicians have been pushing the idea of climate change, but the fact is that they've been lagging, very slow to accept the facts until it really couldn't be denied anymore, and then they still didn't do anything.
Scientists are the ones who've been telling us about climate change for over a century now. Climate activists have picked up that message and have been pushing it. Major parties have mostly ignored it or at best paid lip service to it.
> While it is certainly true in many cases, industry changes imposed by "climate change" lobby are resulting in huge redistribution of wealth.
In what way? You state this as if it's a fact, but this really depends on what kind of industry changes you're going to impose. Well, it's obvious that the oil industry is going to lose their business, which is why they've been investing so much effort into spreading misinformation about it.
But industry changes are normal. Every technological and societal change causes changes to industries. Look at the rise of computers, for just one of many examples.
> To the best of our knowledge, climate change happens on this planet for all time of its existence. How much human activity contributes to that is something extremely difficult to measure and understand.
That is completely missing the point. We're talking specifically about climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, caused by putting more CO2 in the atmosphere by burning more fossil fuels.
The greenhouse effect has been well known for practically 2 centuries now. It's been well-proven on a small scale: more CO2 or other greenhouse gasses (methane, water vapor) in a container that light can enter (like a greenhouse) means the air in the container absorbs more heat and gets hotter.
1 century ago, Alexander Graham Bell wrote a paper that said if this process worked on a small scale, there's no reason why it wouldn't work the same on a large scale, like our atmosphere. If we kept burning oil and coal, eventually the level of CO2 in our atmosphere would rise and our atmosphere would start to heat up. Of course he had no idea yet how fast or how dramatically that would happen, but that it would eventually happen is simply a logical consequence of everything known at that point.
Even since, scientists have been working on models to predict how fast that would happen. How fast are we putting CO2 into the atmosphere, what other processes are there that take it out again (photosynthesis, dissolving as acid into the oceans, and a million other factors). Modelling all those effects is where all the work in climate science has been. The basis of the greenhouse effect is very well established, has been confirmed again and again, and you need to be quite detached from reality to deny it. All those alternative theories (it's just "natural variation") do not explain the data we've got, and also fail to explain why the greenhouse effect wouldn't work on this scale.
In recent decades, the urgency of this issue has finally reached political levels, but as one politician coined it, it's a very inconvenient truth that lots of politicians still refuse to accept. Many politicians have very strong ties to the oil industry (see the Iraq War, Iran 1953 and many, many other examples where leading politicians have been completely in bed with oil companies and basically doing their bidding). Some, but still sadly a minority, are finally coming to grips with how important this issue is, but ...
> You were repeating a nonsense conspiracy theory that's completely detached from reality
Again, I suggest you to stay away from statement like that. You have no right or knowledge to make those condescending statements. Moreover, your emotional reaction just show weaknesses of your position.
> Scientists are the ones who've been telling us about climate change for over a century now
Scientists were telling us that "vaccines are safe and effective". Well, statistics shows otherwise.
> In what way? You state this as if it's a fact, but this really depends on what kind of industry changes you're going to impose
The "climate change" agenda asks for huge societal changes in way humans operate vehicles and "emit CO2". This leads not to global impact and redistribution of income across large enterprises mining minerals for batteries, solar panels and sorts.
> But industry changes are normal
Undoubtedly so. Unless changes are non evolutional and incentivised.
> We're talking specifically about climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, caused by putting more CO2 in the atmosphere by burning more fossil fuels.
You cannot pull out "climate change" you like from climate change in general. Our planet is a very complex organism, in which we still have very little knowledge of how things are going on and what depends on what.
The only way to prudently approach the problem is to see available data across many years and try to make conclusions. It will void all fearmongering done by "activists" and "scientists" and politicians of sorts, that's why no-one does that preferring to hide behind scary predictions like "we all will drown in 10 years" which have no supporting whatsoever.
Oil lobby pushing legislation and profiteering from it is nothing new. It does exist - and so does "climate change" lobby.
Now you go ahead and label it as "misinformation" or something like that because it's important to deny logical thinking when someone tries to assess the "climate change". Otherwise inconvenient truth may come out indeed. Easier to do fearmongering.
> I suggest you to stay away from statement like that.
I will not. Reality is important, and repeated denials of reality, like yours, are dangerous and can mislead people. You may call this condescending and emotional, but you're dancing around the fact that you lie and mislead people, and you don't want to be held accountable for that. You get no free pass from me.
> Scientists were telling us that "vaccines are safe and effective". Well, statistics shows otherwise.
Yeah, let's dodge into a completely different topic. But you're wrong here too. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. The effectiveness of vaccines has been well established for centuries. Small pox has been completely eradicated by vaccines. Polio nearly so. That doesn't mean every vaccine is equally effective, but many vaccines clearly are incredibly effective. It's people sowing unfounded doubt about this who are endangering the lives of millions of people now and in the future.
> The "climate change" agenda asks for huge societal changes in way humans operate vehicles and "emit CO2". This leads not to global impact and redistribution of income across large enterprises mining minerals for batteries, solar panels and sorts.
Did you mean to say it doesn't lead to global impact? Then what exactly are you complaining about?
The fact is, something having impact or consequences doesn't mean it's some sort of nefarious evil. It's a natural consequence of tackling problems, but also of new technologies and new opportunities. The invention of the car, the computer, and really every new product that comes to the market leads to "redistribution of income across large enterprises" because that's how capitalism works. I'm not opposed to tackling the problems of capitalism, but I don't want to do that at the cost of millions of lives.
> Unless changes are non evolutional and incentivised.
What the hell does that mean? Are you trying to hide your lack of real arguments behind vague but scary sounding phrases?
> Our planet is a very complex organism, in which we still have very little knowledge of how things are going on and what depends on what.
Which is why scientists have put a lot of effort into studying that. A lot. And so far, there's not a shred of evidence to cast any doubt on the theory that the greenhouse effect does indeed work on a global scale, like Graham Bell predicted over a century ago.
> The only way to prudently approach the problem is to see available data across many years and try to make conclusions.
We've done that.
But what's also prudent is to try to not cause dramatic changes to a complex system we barely understand, and yet that's exactly what we've been doing for the past centuries. We are having an impact on this complex system of Earth's climate, and we are destabilising it, and the fact that we don't fully understand all the complex intricacies yet, is no reason to just blindly continue destabilising it. The prudent thing would be to stop doing that. But that threatens the profits of the most powerful lobby on the planet.
> Oil lobby pushing legislation and profiteering from it is nothing new. It does exist - and so does "climate change" lobby.
Except the oil lobby is trying to protect their trillion dollar profits, whereas the climate lobby is trying to protect the planet. These are not the same.
> it's important to deny logical thinking when someone tries to assess the "climate change".
I was afraid you'd feel that way, but I'm surprised you're this honest about it.
I have tried to get you to think more critically and more logically about this issue, but if you really feel so strongly that it's important to you to reject logical thinking, then there's not much I can do for you. I just hope others who see this will care and not be drawn into your propaganda.
> Reality is important, and repeated denials of reality, like yours, are dangerous and can mislead people
> you're dancing around the fact that you lie and mislead people, and you don't want to be held accountable for that
What a mix of arrogance and ignorance. My friend, you don't own the reality, neither you have right to baselessly accuse anyone of lying. You don't own the truth either. Stop imagining yourself as saviour of humanity, you are nowhere near that.
> Yeah, let's dodge into a completely different topic.
Don't pretend like you didn't understand the message.
> Except the oil lobby is trying to protect their trillion dollar profits, whereas the climate lobby is trying to protect the planet. These are not the same.
This got me laughing hard. Nobody gives a shit about the Planet - you may want to look at "climate change" scam preachers - they use private jets that emit a lot of so hated CO2 while preaching everyone needs to drive electric vehicle. Just follow the money - don't follow what they preach. To believe all those Al Gores want to save the planet is either naive or stupid. I'll let you pick the category of your liking.
All all those conferences, promos that they do and to which they fly on private jets where flight expenditures cost 50k to anywhere above few thousands - who pays all those expenses you think?
I don't expect any coherence from you, but if someone who will read this and still not convinced it's a scam I suggest to have a look what "climate change" preachers were preaching and predicting 10-15-20-30 years ago and how many of those predictions have happened. I'll save you time - it's zero. But don't trust me, do you own research.
> We are having an impact on this complex system of Earth's climate, and we are destabilising it
You are thinking too much of yourself. Nothing is "destabilising" it, this Planet allegedly existed over 4.6bn years, and likely will exist more.
> I have tried to get you to think more critically and more logically about this issue
Congratulations - you have "caught" me on mistype. Glad you enjoyed it. One thing - please don't use "critical thinking" without knowing what that means. Labelling "propaganda", "misinformation", "lies" is exactly opposite of that and you know it well.
But neither do you. Reality exists independently from either of us, but only one of us seems to be paying attention to it.
> neither you have right to baselessly accuse anyone of lying.
I'm not doing it baselessly, though. All of the things you've said that I've called out as lies, are lies, blatant untruths, and/or have been thoroughly debunked.
> Don't pretend like you didn't understand the message.
The message that you're not limiting yourself to just one debunked conspiracy theory? Yeah, I got that.
> Nobody gives a shit about the Planet
Don't project your own cynicism on others.
> you may want to look at "climate change" scam preachers - they use private jets
No, those are the oil executives, as well as hypocrites who love to pretend to be doing good while only being in it for attention. The actual climate activists don't fly by private jets, and many of them rarely or never fly at all. I'm not exactly on the forefront of climate activism, but even I haven't flown in years.
You're only paying attention to the rich and famous, and not to the real people on the ground.
You're only paying attention to the hypocrites and think you're pointing out something new when you say they're hypocrites, but everybody knows that already. But because the hypocrites are talking about the environment, you conclude that everybody who talks about the environment must be a hypocrite, and therefore it must be false, but that's not how logic works. There are hypocrites talking about every topic, including yours, but that doesn't make every person on Earth a hypocrite or every topic false.
You're clutching at your own selection bias to prove your own strawman. But the only one who falls for that backwards logic is you.
> I suggest to have a look what "climate change" preachers were preaching and predicting 10-15-20-30 years ago and how many of those predictions have happened. I'll save you time - it's zero. But don't trust me, do you own research.
I'm sure you've cherry-picked your own selection of outrageous claims to prove your point, but if you actually did your research honestly, you'd see it's not zero. Many predictions have come true.
A small selection:
* Temperatures are rising. This has been quite thoroughly documented. I think the past 8 years are the 8 hottest years on record. Most of the hottest years on record have happened since 1998.
* Glaciers are melting. Lots of glaciers are significantly smaller or have disappeared completely.
* Sea ice is melting. North Pole ice is smaller and smaller every year.
* Weather is getting less stable. Some areas get unprecedented floods, others extreme draughts. Blizzards in Texas, balmy weather on the North Pole.
Of course there have been alarmists who turned the thing into a caricature, but those have always been called out as nonsense.
> Nothing is "destabilising" it, this Planet allegedly existed over 4.6bn years, and likely will exist more.
Read more carefully. The climate is destabilising. Not the planet. Nobody is saying the planet will explode. That's even beyond the more usual nonsense caricatures.
> All of the things you've said that I've called out as lies, are lies, blatant untruths, and/or have been thoroughly debunked.
As usual, there is no proof of "debunking".
> No, those are the oil executives, as well as hypocrites who love to pretend to be doing good while only being in it for attention
Normally I should have stopped long ago as I normally don't entertain religious fanatics. "Climate change" scam advocates are perfectly fitting your description of hypocrites as to best of my knowledge none of them follows their preachings. It's all entertainment for dumb crowd.
> You're only paying attention to the rich and famous, and not to the real people on the ground.
I am talking about "climate change" preachers. They don't follow what they preach. Certainly some people do follow those preachings, but I have nothing more than pity for them.
> I'm sure you've cherry-picked your own selection of outrageous claims to prove your point, but if you actually did your research honestly, you'd see it's not zero. Many predictions have come true.
I like how you are trying to project your ways of discussion on me :) Says a lot. Just a reminder - I didn't "cherry pick" anything for anyone who can read and encouraged doing their own research. Sapienti sat.
> A small selection:
Your selection is "water is wet". It's not a selection.
> Weather is getting less stable. Some areas get unprecedented floods, others extreme draughts
And this one is outright lie. There is no data supporting it. Droughts, floods happened there over course of history. Just because ww have internet now and can read about it and see photos on Instagram doesn't make it any "less stable". Although I think you know it and just trying to deceive to push your narrative.
> The climate is destabilising
I would ask what this nonsensical sentence means but sorry I have no time to prolong this discussion. Wishing you all the best
Isn't the usual answer to this something about how those power plants have to adhere to pollution control regulations as well as there being regenerative braking?
Yes natural gas has less Co2 emissions per BTU than oil and natural gas can be burned very efficiently in a power plant at nearly 60% vs say 40% for diesel or 30% for gasoline in an ICE.
An EV gets cleaner as the grid it charges from gets cleaner over time. A petroleum powered vehicle remains dirty for its entire lifetime. EVs allow you to electrify mobility and transition to renewables in parallel.
(Global renewables investment is hovering around $1.5T/year)
Larger stationary engines are typically far more efficient than the engines that we find in our cars. Natgas is up to 55% efficient, where cars are 35% at the top-end. On top of that, the fuel you use in your car has to be transported to your gas station by another car. Natgas and coal are transported over pipes and rails.
Natural gas burned at scale is incredibly efficient. It's one of the reasons Obama was such a big proponent - that and we have an ocean of it in Texas.
People have forgotten that you used to have to power wash buildings yearly in the Northeast from all the coal pollution. Natgas is NOT perfect, but it's about as good as fossil fuels can be - no tailings, no ash piles, easy to transport via pipeline.
I still think Offshore Wind is going to get us to the finish line though. It acts a lot more like baseload generation than onshore.
Even if an EV is powered by 100% coal, it still only produces the same CO2 as a 50mpg ICEV. Natural gas produces significantly less CO2 than coal. Most locations have a mix of power sources that are at partially or majority renewable.
Definitely. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and even the dirtiest coal power plant is still cleaner than an internal combustion engine. Internal combustion engines are extremely inefficient. Even felt the tailpipe of a car with a running engine? (Don't!) It's hot. That's all wasted energy.
Most of the energy used by a car goes into producing wasted heat (power plants are much better at winning back useful energy from that heat). Most of the rest of the energy used by a car goes into moving the weight of the car itself. Only a tiny part goes into moving the actual occupants of the car. That's why even electric cars are still wasteful: they're still too big and heavy and moving their own weight around. Bikes or mass transit are far more efficient. But EVs are still more efficient than ICE vehicles, even if the energy they use is dirty.
Only if the majority populations of the world in developing countries follow along.
The major oil producing nations are not going to stop selling oil though, they depend on it to survive, and likewise developing nations depend on petroleum products to feed themselves and operate their businesses. They can't afford to transition in any timespan that matters for a critical climate change scenario.
What we're on course to do in the West is destroy our economies for no reason as carbon usage will just move elsewhere. In the process we will lose our ability to lead to cleaner technologies by destroying our financial base.
The US made a hard turn towards green energy the day Biden got into office. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline on day 1, and has been running an aggressively anti-oil energy policy, which the EU is following as well. This has caused inflation to spread across the supply chain as input costs have drastically increased. Oil products are vital for food production too, so it's affecting that as well.
This isn't just an update to a basically disposable cell phone, these policy changes have huge impacts, such that we can't even fully know ahead of time the unintended consequences.
Why would it destroy our economy if carbon use moves elsewhere? Carbon use is not a goal, it's merely the means by which we currently generate most of our energy. If we replace the means by which we generate our energy, we don't need carbon anymore. The fact that others haven't made that transition yet doesn't hurt us. Quite the contrary: the fact that we made that transition will make it easier for them to make the same transition.
And the US definitely needs to be first. The US uses far more carbon per person than any other country; even more than Europe. Developing countries are not remotely in the same order of magnitude.
Having the US and EU transition to cleaner energy will be a massive boon to the world, even if nobody else follows suit. But the US and EU figuring out all the issues of this transition will make it easier for other countries to make that transition too, and it will put more pressure on them to do so.
The US is really not the country that should wait for others to go first here. Take the lead.
Because it makes everything cost a lot more money. Your industry is not competitive and it declines. Other countries move ahead and exploit your weakness for their advantage.
No one is saying green technologies are bad, they aren't. The question is the scope. If we ask them to do something they're not technologically and economically ready to do they're going to fail.
That's doom thinking that's just going to lead to doubt and inaction. Green technologies can absolutely become competitive, and in many cases already are. On top of that, there's a lot more to industrial competition than just where your energy comes from. There are a lot of countries with very cheap energy that are not dominating the world in industry. And there are countries with expensive energy that are.
US drives 3.4T vehicle-miles per year[1]. At 3mi/kWh (which is low for an EV), that needs 1133TWh total electricity per year. Last year the US grid produced 4108TWh[2]. So to accommodate all that extra need, the production needs to grow by about 27%. Not all cars are replaced right away, so this can be a growth of a few % per year.
It’s good to just do the math for how much driving equates to how much electricity per day. At 3 miles per kwh it’s about 0.33 kwh per mile. EVs cars charge at 3.3-6.6 kWh per hour or 9.9-19.8 miles per hour with that efficiency. Further, that charge rate could be reduced if it’s too much for the line, theoretically, if things were smart.
Edit-I figure in a perfect universe we’d have chargers at every likely to be used parking spot and they’d charge in accordance to power availability and the duration a person is likely to be there. So at work you’d plug in, the charger would know you’ll be there for a considerable amount of time, and maybe you wouldn’t get 6.6 kWh the whole duration but you’ll wind up at 80% (or whatever you requested) by the end of the shift. Similar with apartments. Costco or big box stores would assume you’d be there for 1-2 hours and would offer faster charging for those coming in from greater distances. Etc. it’s not impossible. This could ameliorate generation changes over time.
Apartment complexes and residentials could use this instead of on-site batteries to make use of their solar generation.
You speak in hypotheticals, but these things already exist. I often charge my car while shopping.
The grid already handles high peaks. There's plenty of unused capacity outside of the 6pm-10pm peak of the Duck Curve. Cars support scheduling charging, so even if you come home at 6pm and want to plug in without thinking about it, you can (and note that a modern BEV used for commuting needs to be plugged only once a week). If you charge at work, it's even better, because that's at the bottom of the Duck Curve when you could almost get paid to get the electricity off the grid. Fast DC charging sites often already have large battery storage built-in, because it's already more profitable to use lower-power grid connection and/or off-peak electricity.
Some US states (Texas!) don't even have the energy infrastructure to keep all houses warm and lit during winter. But that's something that a more responsible government could invest in. Don't complain that it can't be done, but vote for a government that will do it.
Not exactly true, you can burn natural gas very efficiently at a power plant and coal can be made relatively efficient compared to say gasoline. Power plants can have very extensive emissions controls maintained by dedicated staff as well.
Going electric decouples fuel use from power use allowing your vehicle to run off whatever fuel source is available even garbage [1]. Power generation can transition to renewables without replacing existing vehicles.
With enough batteries in circulation recycling turns into a circular economy with batteries being high grade ore.
Electric vehicles allow energy independence because of fuel agility even if emissions are no better, but because of the agility allows less painful transitions to better energy sources.
Even burning 100% coal, EVs produce significantly less CO2 than ICEVs. Most of the US has a mix of power sources that is much cleaner than the all coal or all gas grid you imagine. and the percentage of renewables is growing and coal, in particular is dropping. Take a look at this map showing the equivalent mpg for an EV in various us locales.
Two issues, the first one small and improving : the smelting is energy expensive and does polute a lot. We're improving fast though, now that material scientific research got more credits.
The big one: as we use more and more minerals, it's harder to find ore as easely accessible or as concentrated. If in the next decade we manage to build tidal/solar mining rigs, I'll be more optimistic about the future.
There's also recycling. It's possible to recycle the lithium in batteries for example but not possible to recycle all of the oil that is pulled out of the ground to produce gasoline.
They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.
They are a bridge towards lowering emissions but they cannot get us to zero or negative emissions. For as long as they are in use cars will simply remain "part of the problem". Acutely, personal vehicles used for quotidian trips are a large part of the contribution towards carbon emissions and can easily be phased out with improved urban and residential design patterns, public/collective transport infrastructure, and low-tech solutions like bikes, draft animals, etc .
IMO the BEV is a far more flexible platform for transporation than the ICE.
Batteries are still made as cells. Need one for a car? Put 10,000 together. Need one for an e-bike? Put 10-20 together. Need one for a scooter? Put 5-10 together.
Cell economics are generally the same.
Furthermore, you can make the battery in an ebike or scooter removable and recharge it at work or at a friend's house. No gasoline stink. Or you can make the scooter/blade foldable and haul it in. Again, no gasoline stink.
For urban transport, BEV scaling provides the opportunity to affordably enable these energy efficient modes better than stinky dirty two stroke crap.
I think what can also happen is that you buy a city car with a 100 mile range, but if you need to go far, you rent an "extension battery", maybe a very energy efficient trailer, or even an ICE range extender. Or maybe it just attaches to the back of the vehicle, or if the battery is swappable, you swap in a rentable long range one.
And remember, don't concentrate on current battery economics. Between higher density sodium ion + LFP, sulfur chemistries, solid state, and maybe lithium air batteries, densities will go up by 2-3x in the next ten years. That means less materials, lighter vehicles / battery "rocket equation" for more range from a lighter battery with the same power storage, etc.
Zero or negative emissions is perfect being the enemy of bad. BEVs are an enormous opportunity to mitigate massive amounts of emissions AND be a better product that is cheaper for people.
There does not exist a practical political path to zero emissions right now, as much as it pains me to say so.
What we do need (and there is some political opportunity to do so) is massive funding of BEV transporation at all levels / form factors. There should be a 300-500$ price credit (phasing out 10% per year) for scooters and ebikes to get them prevalent. Make them stupid cheap to adopt.
Fund the hell out of battery development. Double down on all the national lab work on batteries (that lithium air paper recently was nice, we should see stuff like that out of every single national lab).
For cars, the charging part is inconvenient and there's still not enough infrastructure. So maybe combine a 20 kW battery with a hydrogen fuel cell rather than use superchargers. All charging stations are busy? Fine, get a refill of H2 and go.
Hydrogen is even harder to find than charging infrastructure. It’s not easy to convert a gas station into a hydrogen station.
To me the two solutions revolve around simple battery tech.
1. Charging stations like we have now but 100x as many.
2. Battery swap stations a la Nio in China. In their system you buy the car (for pretty cheap) and rent the battery. Makes upfront cost cheaper and batteries need replacing anyway so if you can swap batteries easily you never have to worry about this.
Battery swapping will utterly explode the amount of raw materials needed. It's going to be hydrogen cars simply because it is the genuinely scalable solution. The exact details don't really matter, so long as raw material usage is greatly reduced. You can have cars fully powered by hydrogen, or some kind of PHEV with a fuel cell range extender. Any variation of the idea will work.
I regularly use an EV for several weeks/months at a time and I also own an ICE car. The EV is in no way less convenient. While it takes longer to charge "on the road," I (and most people) only rarely do road trips of a length that intermittent charging is necessary. When I do, the extra 20 minutes spent at a charger is no big deal, you just plan accordingly.
On the flip side, on most days it would be much more hassle to spend 10 minutes or so refueling my ICE car instead of just driving home, connecting my EV and let it charge overnight.
Granted, I have a property that allows the installation of a charger. But so do basically all suburban Americans, many people in cities and around the world. People that live so urban that owning their own charging infrastructure is impractical are probably better served with public transport, anyway.
You have both of these options with BEV+H2, the H2 is just a ranger extender to keep the battery smaller, refueling on the road more convenient and the car's price lower. Renault has already done this for commercial vehicles (Master and Kangoo ZE). Plus I'm sure there will be options with the H2 tank compartment filled by a larger battery for people who prefer the former.
Just stop it. You’re not going to convince (at least in America) people in the suburbs and rural areas to give up their lifestyle. It’s just not going to happen. People are not going to ride a scooter 15 miles to and from the grocery store in freezing weather.
Everyone will have to pile into cities so they can ride a scooter to and from the grocery store in freezing weather. They simply will have to adjust or die.
Just move to a city which has nice weather all year around. Preferably with relatively flat and compact geography. It’s pretty straightforward, I don’t get why everyone is complaining so much…
We just have to get better at City Planning in the States. It’s difficult, but not that difficult. Almost all of Western Europe has figured this out (along with health care and education). Dense cities with mixed zoning and good public transit are so much more enjoyable and efficient than the urban hellscapes we create in the USA. I have no delusions we will make any changes, but the changes can be made.
Would imply that Europe hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Sure large urban areas have decent mass transit. Many people still live in smaller towns, villages or suburbs and commute by car everyday. Especially in larger more decentralized countries like Germany.
in every country included 60-70% commute by car. Which is barely lower than it is in the US. I think it’s a myth that Western Europe is significantly ahead (and I think it applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to other areas like health and education). The grass is always greener on the other side of the ocean…
You say that as if 15 miles to the grocery store is an unavoidable fact of life. Grocery stores can and should be a lot closer to where people live. My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk from my home.
The big problem is that everything in the US has been designed around extreme car dependency, and more than that: extreme gas consumption. Because American cars are also much larger and heavier than they reasonably should be. Much about how American life seems to have been explicitly designed to maximise oil use and oil profits, even to the point where it stops making any kind of sense.
So if there's a reason this can't change, then it's because oil companies hold far too much power over American politics and over the way people think.
See also the recent conspiracy protests against "15 minute cities". The only meaningful reason I can think of why anyone would oppose that, is because it's going to hurt oil profits.
It's not just an American issue. Quite a few places in the world have similar situations (for various reasons). That problem is rarely a major issue, though; transportation in urban areas can be improved a lot and there's no reason to not implement different solutions for different circumstances, such as urban and rural areas. Fossil fuel-dependency _is not_ a problem we can solve with one single solution that fits everyone.
The tricky part is getting someone else to take the first step -- there's going to be a lot of changes if we really want to do this, and most people seems firmly convinced that someone else should take the lead.
There are indeed a lot of countries that have followed the American lead into car dependent urban design. But the issue is by far the worst in the US (and possibly Canada). Although SUVs exist elsewhere, they are far more common in the US. And in no other country do they get as ridiculously big as in the US.
But you're absolutely right there's no single silver bullet. The problem is big and complex, and so is the solution. Smaller cars, less cars, electric cars, more bike infrastructure, better public transport, better designed cities. All of those things are part of the solution.
Of course most of this is about urban areas; rural areas have very different requirements, and some of these solutions are irrelevant or infeasible there. Cities can do without cars, rural areas probably not, which is part of why electric cars are still important.
> Grocery stores can and should be a lot closer to where people live.
And how do groceries get to the vast network of local stores ?
Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe. There's a reason our US friends measure travel in time taken, and not distance travelled. The number of shops needed to "locally supply" everybody would be gigantic.
The more stores that needs to be supplied, the more trucks needs to drive around supplying them, which leads to the question; what pollutes the most ?
If humanity wants to make an improvement, we need much more public transportation, and not like today where it's "once per hour unless you live downtown", but in a way that doesn't make a 30 minute trip take 90 minutes. If we manage that, it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.
To give an impression of the size difference, the Netherlands covers an area of 16,160 sq mi (41,850 km2), and New York State alone covers 54,556 square miles (141,300 km2), and New York State is the 27th largest state in the US.
> My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk
And how many of those groceries are produced in Amsterdam ? Each an every one has been transported on one or more trucks to arrive in a convenient walking distance to you. I fully agree and understand that shops needs to be local, but they're not the most environmentally friendly solution.
Groceries get to the shops by trucks. This is no different whether you have large or small shops. The only difference is: do you send all the trucks to the same shop or do you spread them over multiple shops. Amsterdam has no problem keeping its many, many smaller supermarkets well-stocked. Sure, it's a logistical challenge, but not one that cannot be solved.
> Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe.
Of course, but how is that relevant? The fact that a country is larger doesn't mean that you have to make people travel all that distance. Imagine the EU merges into a single country at some point. That's not going to change the logistical situation around Amsterdam in any way. Logistics is already very international in the EU.
> what pollutes the most?
Yeah, what pollutes the most? Lots of trucks driving to a central big store, and then having people drive even more cars to that central store, or driving all those trucks to smaller local stores that people walk to? For the smaller shops, you probably don't need big trucks, but smaller ones, which does mean more of them, but still not remotely as many as the cars your saving. And some delivery trucks in Amsterdam are pretty light and electric already.
> it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.
It still does. Mind you, more public transport is absolutely vital. I totally agree with that. And Amsterdam has pretty decent public transport (though biking is generally faster), but I still prefer local shops.
I am tired of this idea that the US being large invalidates anything that happens in Europe as impossible.
I lived in Russia for a while, in a city in the middle of Siberia, and there is a night and day difference between how people live.
Russia is even larger than the US, but living in single-family detached homes is just not very common. So, most things tend to be within walking distance. And public transport is much more effective.
To some extent but not a large extent. SUVs tend to be less safe than their sedan counterparts. Worse on rollovers, worse on emergency handling, and much worse on visibility. You might survive a crash better in an SUV, but you're more likely to get into a crash with an SUV, canceling out any gains and quite possibly eroding even further into loss of safety.
One of the only things that makes SUVs safer is their greater mass, which largely serves to make the road less safe for collisions with non-SUV drivers. With regard to vehicle size, I observed back in the 1990s when the SUV craze began that America was in a war of size attrition with itself.
Even a Mini Cooper is quite survivable in a crash. Crumple zones and airbags are not just standard issue on gargantuan vehicles.
From what I understand, it's the result of the lack of US vehicle safety standards. Or perhaps a loophole in them.
Trucks have different safety standards than cars, and car manufacturers find the car safety standards annoying, so they started marketing trucks to consumers. They don't have to obey the same regulations as cars, and yet because they're light trucks, they don't require a commercial driving license. That's the loophole through which the US car industry managed to drive their entire industry.
The ideal solution is always going to be mass transit. But if that isn't possible, then the next best idea would be fuel cell cars. They are also a type of EV and therefore zero emissions, but unlikely battery cars they do not have the massive mining requirements.
They require hydrogen storage, though, right? Isn't it a problem to store that densely enough to get meaningful range? I do believe it's popular for city buses, though; they can afford to refuel a lot.
There's no issue with mass transit. It's possible. It's even inevitable.
I guess it depends what you mean by mass transit but communal, shared transportation solutions that replace private vehicle ownership. Yeah, that's simple.
That's half-true for the running costs (if you ignore material wear, like tires and stuff). But the manufacture of cars (and stuff in general) and the gathering of materials (read: mining) for that costs a lot of energy and, more importantly, causes a ton of other environmental impact.
> But the manufacture of cars (and stuff in general) and the gathering of materials (read: mining) for that costs a lot of energy
Is there a reason that a large part of that could not come from renewables ?
There is literally nothing that we can do with Gas/Oil that we cannot do with electricity, or by extension by converting that electricity in to solid fuels like hydrogen or Power-2-X.
Normally, by the laws of thermodynamics, you cannot extract more energy than you put in a system, but since the energy for renewables is from external sources (mostly derived by the sun/gravity), that means we can severely reduce our CO2 emissions, or even start extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
1kg of hydrogen has about 36 kWh worth of energy in it, and it requires roughly 50kWh to produce it, which is a bad deal if those 50kWh comes from gas/oil/coal, but if instead they come from excess solar/wind/hydroelectric energy, you're essentially gaining 36 kWh worth of energy that would otherwise be "lost".
> But are they clean enough [....] ? No they are not.
1) Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
2) Accept that people are not going to stop using cars, and work with what you have, unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle, or you are able to invent something they will actually want more than cars.
I think it's important to realize that "People will always use cars" and "We can and should reduce car usage" are not contradictory.
We need to both offer and incentivize alternatives, find ways to reduce car dependency, etc and make sure that remaining car usage is as clean as possible. (This applies to both the car usage that we can get rid of in the mid- to long-term but haven't yet and the "residual" car usage that we can't seem to get rid of.)
This is what I meant by "a bridge." I don't think you really understand the point of my comment.
> unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle
I know you are being facetious but I ironically, yes there is a mysterious power that compels mankind to change their lifestyle. That's how we got here; it's not like the enclosure and industrialization was a grassroots effort or an accidental happenstance. Its called the industrial revolution for a reason. The truth is it was directed by a privileged minority with a lot of power. It was not done democratically. It certainly wasn't privileged consumers saying, "hey I want to give up generational farming of inherited land to live in an urban slum and work in textile mill". Their hands were forced by policy and in some cases violence. Societies are reticent and often reactionary. When that reluctance endangers the progress of the governing interests (capital here for all intents and purposes) suddenly "mysterious power"s become less fun to talk about.
But hey you don't have to listen to me; it also doesn't matter what we think anyways because like I'm saying its not like there is much personal choice in this shift -- unless youre in the really upper echelons, I guess then you can do whatever you want.
The real issue is that Americans are too rich and pampered.
If you reduce disposable income massively in line with the rest of the world, then they won't be able to afford private vehicles and the change will come naturally.
Income is also a measure of value / productivity. So reducing income is reducing value and productivity. Rest of the world will not benefit from reduced us value.
Yeah, this is the crux of it. Many responders here seem to believe they have a choice in the matter, or perhaps more acutely that their limited choiceset is the only factor in what happens.
People seem to have forgotten that government, trade, and economic policies enabled the status quo and it will be used (we can actually see it already is) to modify it. It's pretty hard to justify whining about your pampered lifestyle when the next folks can't even afford to eat.
Forgetting for a second food and agriculture (the biggest problem in carbon pollution that no one likes to talk about), it's no secret that the up front cost of an EV is higher, even with subsidies. It shouldn't be hard to imagine the logical continuation of that concept, extended through to supply chains from chips all the way to raw minerals.
> They're cleaner, no doubt. But are they clean enough that a 1-1 replacement could avert massive ecological destruction à la global warming? No they are not.
This is the main reason why I sold my Tesla and went back to my horse and buggy.
It will help us getting to a place where we don't pump up stuff from below ground which ultimately ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground, we would have left other CO2 sources which are from cyclical sources, and which we can deal with other ways.
You could provide even rough numbers to back up your claims. For example, personal cars being a "large part" of carbon emissions. A single container ship outputs more emissions than tens of millions of cars. What percentage of carbon emissions are actually associated with cars compared to the other behemoth polluters in the world?
I read through one of the papers and a key assumption that the energy mix powering the grid will more halve its co2 output over the next 10 years and cites Germany as the baseline trend. This is a crazy optimistic assumption to make
I don’t think that year figure changing really matters though.
Let’s say Germany halves its CO2 output in 25 years instead. What does that mean? Does it mean we should all stop buying EVs now and just buy combustion engine vehicles for eternity? Nope.
The biggest environmental concern always cited for EVs is the source of electricity, which has a decent chance of being renewable, going forward. Fossil fuel ICEs have zero chance. They will always be dirty.
The second biggest concern is mining for the lithium used in EVs, which hopefully soon will be a much smaller concern as Sodium batteries become the norm. Again, there is a risk we could still be mining lithium in 20 years, but it's a risk rather than a certainty.
Germany halving its CO2 output would be commendable, but likely not enough to offset even a moderate increase of CO2 production by China, India, and the growing economies of Africa and Asia. They just can't afford switching to electric processes unless solar / wind plus storage, or nuclear, is a clearly and significantly cheaper option. (Which it is not yet.)
It might mean the switch to EVs are insufficient if it bakes in unrealistic expectations of future benefits. The cost and subsidies to EVs might be better spent elsewhere. I’m not making a comment on pro/against EVs only that the cited paper makes an assumption I believe to be overly optimistic
This article and information cited doesn't seem realistic to me. I don't have time to do a deep dive into their calculations but the claim that EV's are 10x more energy efficient over their lifetime just doesn't hold water to me or is based on invalid assumptions, e.g. all EV electricity comes from a "clean power source" such as nuclear power, wind, hydroelectric. Excess power for more EV's largely does not come from clean power sources.
Most "excess power" for EV's comes from fossil fuel -- that is, given our current power infrastructure and supply of clean energy, when add power demand from more EV's... that supply is mostly coming from natural gas (maybe some coal too, yikes).
EV energy lifecycle is roughly: (0) recover/frack/process natural gas out of ground and transport to power station (1) Burn natural gas to make electrical energy, (2) transmit electricity to charging station... which has transmission loss, (3) charge EV... which has loss, (4) discharge energy from battery to motors...which has loss, (5) convert electrical power to mechanical power to the wheels in the motor... which has loss.
Internal combustion engine (ICE) energy lifecycle is: (0) recover crude oil and refine crude to fuel, transport to gas station (1) fill car... very low energy loss, much lower than charge dishcarge of EV's (2) burn fuel in ICE
Thermodynamic efficiency of burning natural gas is about 45-55% depending upon plant design.
There are transmission and charge/discharge/conversion losses associated with getting the electricity to EV's and using it.
Burning petrol fuels in an ICE is about 30-35% efficient in modern engines. There are higher carbon associated with recovering and processing crude oil relative to natural gas.
When discussing fossil fuel power plants: natural gas plants are about 2x to 2.5x more carbon efficient than coal or other fossil fuel plants on mass of CO2 per kWh generated.
I'm not going to run detailed numbers but more than 10x carbon operating efficiency for EV's over ICE's is high. I think the operational efficiency benefit is only 2-3x, which is still a lot. I also think these studies are probably under reporting energy requirements for EV battery production because so much of the supply chain is in the developing world or China and it is hard to get accurate data.
That all being said, EV's are a big part of our future and part of the solution toward building a more energy efficient world.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadnuclear energy has been largely phased down for political reasons and CO2 emissions are still on a level where EVs might not be much cleaner in comparison, see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
It’s just so wildly more efficient in operation.
Can you elaborate?
- lots of energy lost to heat
- aggregate efficiency lost to going to refueling stations
- decreased efficiency over the life span of the vehicle
EV cars have a few key efficiencies
- able to regenerate power on braking (a HUGE amount, and also why hybrid cars last so long)
- longer lifespan of vehicle and drive train (EVs are significantly more reliable, and the lack of moving parts means that wear takes quite a lot longer). an example of this in practice is the significantly better reliability of hybrid cars, which reduce hours on the ICE engine with batteries to great benefit
and we haven't even unlocked all of the benefits, battery density, and recycling stories available for EVs that will propel them further.
The key deficiencies for EVs right now are
- cost - this has been going down over time, EVs are still firmly in the luxury segment, although we will likely see a new sub-$25k EV with reasonable mileage by the end of the decade
- battery pollution - mining the batteries is bad, there is no way around it. battery recycling is a new technology and will be crucial for EVs in the future, both for cost reasons, but also pollution
- tire pollution - the heavy weight of EVs leads to high particulate matter of rubber, but this is also something that is being actively worked on. It also increases load wear, but new battery tech will help mitigate this.
- power grid - high ev saturation will overload the powergrid, although this is greatly mitigated by solar banking and low peak charging. This might be one of the hardest things to overcome, as it requires significant public spending, but it's not hopeless at all.
No matter which way you look at it, EVs are the future, but there are still lots of issues to be worked on.
The other thing we've still haven't had enough time to fully discover is how much individual cells wear out and the big picture of the economics of swapping out only the individual cell that's bad. There's already been some practical work doing that, I'm just not aware of any longitudinal studies about it.
Right now, 2023 Chevy Bolt are being sold in the US for $26.5k msrp, with $7.5k off EV credit, and a 259 mile range.
Isn't the power grid a bunch of wires in the air or on the ground that can span thousands of miles?
Compare that to oil wells, supertankers, refineries, fuel trucks and gas stations, it seems to be relatively benign infrastructure.
also, I think with distributed pv solar and wind, the power grid will become more distributed. And I think fair time-of-use might solve problems too.
EV's also have some other side benefits, like less noise (noise pollution is a real thing) and less air pollution (tires and asphalt are also a large part of car related air pollution).
Anecdotally whenever I return home from time out in rural Australia, it takes me a while to adjust to the air pollution while near roads, and we have some of the cleanest air of any city.
A coal powered EV has roughly equivalent emissions to a gasoline car, and a natgas powered EV has roughly 2/3 the emissions of a gasoline car.
So a German EV would have roughly 0.35 + 0.15x2/3 + 0.5x0 = 0.45 the emissions of an EV.
And you cherry picked one of the higher polluting countries.
Can you cite this? Thank you
Germany is showing 543 gCO₂eq/kWh. A gallon of gasoline is 8887 grams/gallon. Add 40% to account for refining & transporting the gas to the gas station.
A Tesla at 5 miles/kWh emits 109 g/mile.
A Camry at 30 mpg emits 415 g/mile.
That doesn’t seem right, gas is 20-30% lighter than water and water is only 8lbs~=3600 grams.
Burn 1g of coal, to make it easy:
Carbon has molecular mass 12g/mole (carbon has atomic weight ~12), carbon dioxide 44g/mole (12 + 2×16).So burning 1g of carbon produces 3.67g of CO₂.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...
this is a tool that UCS makes available to give you a mpg equivalent for a particular EV in a particular zip code based on the same data. https://evtool.ucsusa.org/
So those numbers are significantly out of date.
I’ve been having this discussion for a decade. The “do you know where the electricity comes from” group gets a little quieter every year.
What’s really critical is getting the EV market jumpstarted.
Controlling the emissions at several thousand power plants vs a billion cars is orders of magnitude easier.
Not everywhere is doing well at the second part of the problem, but Germany's grid is already at 30% renewables, and has time to transform toward renewables while we attempt to electrify the vehicles.
You can also shortcut the process if you own a house, by putting solar on your roof and charging from that. Places like California and South Australia have immense deployments of rooftop solar generation that have rocketed the states toward their renewables goals. South Australia generates over 70% of it's power from renewables. It went from 1% renewable to 70%+ in just 15 years.
The EPA is run by former lobbyists of the world’s major polluters and producers of pesticides/herbicides/fungicides.
We need listen to rational arguments and statistically verifiable concepts if we are seeking the truth instead of focusing on personalities.
The rational arguments warning us about global warming and climate change go back more than 100 years. Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) wrote an article in 1908 where he explained why burning oil would eventually lead to global warming. Because scientists already knew how this worked over 100 years ago. Politicians have only very recently been coming to grips with this, and even then extremely reluctantly, because they know it will hurt their powerful oil buddies.
Statements like that are not leading to fruitful discussions and signals of you as not very intelligent person. I suggest to stay away from it.
> Politicians have been incredibly slow to accept the reality of climate change because they depend on oil dollars.
That's very primitive state of facts. While it is certainly true in many cases, industry changes imposed by "climate change" lobby are resulting in huge redistribution of wealth. Companies and countries who benefit from that certainly incentivise the process and lobbyists. So you are right - but that's only part of the picture.
> The rational arguments warning us about global warming and climate change go back more than 100 years
To the best of our knowledge, climate change happens on this planet for all time of its existence. How much human activity contributes to that is something extremely difficult to measure and understand.
Normally yes, but not in this case. You were repeating a nonsense conspiracy theory that's completely detached from reality. That is something that signals you as a not very intelligent person, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.
> That's very primitive state of facts.
Facts nonetheless. You try to present it as if politicians have been pushing the idea of climate change, but the fact is that they've been lagging, very slow to accept the facts until it really couldn't be denied anymore, and then they still didn't do anything.
Scientists are the ones who've been telling us about climate change for over a century now. Climate activists have picked up that message and have been pushing it. Major parties have mostly ignored it or at best paid lip service to it.
> While it is certainly true in many cases, industry changes imposed by "climate change" lobby are resulting in huge redistribution of wealth.
In what way? You state this as if it's a fact, but this really depends on what kind of industry changes you're going to impose. Well, it's obvious that the oil industry is going to lose their business, which is why they've been investing so much effort into spreading misinformation about it.
But industry changes are normal. Every technological and societal change causes changes to industries. Look at the rise of computers, for just one of many examples.
> To the best of our knowledge, climate change happens on this planet for all time of its existence. How much human activity contributes to that is something extremely difficult to measure and understand.
That is completely missing the point. We're talking specifically about climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, caused by putting more CO2 in the atmosphere by burning more fossil fuels.
The greenhouse effect has been well known for practically 2 centuries now. It's been well-proven on a small scale: more CO2 or other greenhouse gasses (methane, water vapor) in a container that light can enter (like a greenhouse) means the air in the container absorbs more heat and gets hotter.
1 century ago, Alexander Graham Bell wrote a paper that said if this process worked on a small scale, there's no reason why it wouldn't work the same on a large scale, like our atmosphere. If we kept burning oil and coal, eventually the level of CO2 in our atmosphere would rise and our atmosphere would start to heat up. Of course he had no idea yet how fast or how dramatically that would happen, but that it would eventually happen is simply a logical consequence of everything known at that point.
Even since, scientists have been working on models to predict how fast that would happen. How fast are we putting CO2 into the atmosphere, what other processes are there that take it out again (photosynthesis, dissolving as acid into the oceans, and a million other factors). Modelling all those effects is where all the work in climate science has been. The basis of the greenhouse effect is very well established, has been confirmed again and again, and you need to be quite detached from reality to deny it. All those alternative theories (it's just "natural variation") do not explain the data we've got, and also fail to explain why the greenhouse effect wouldn't work on this scale.
In recent decades, the urgency of this issue has finally reached political levels, but as one politician coined it, it's a very inconvenient truth that lots of politicians still refuse to accept. Many politicians have very strong ties to the oil industry (see the Iraq War, Iran 1953 and many, many other examples where leading politicians have been completely in bed with oil companies and basically doing their bidding). Some, but still sadly a minority, are finally coming to grips with how important this issue is, but ...
Again, I suggest you to stay away from statement like that. You have no right or knowledge to make those condescending statements. Moreover, your emotional reaction just show weaknesses of your position.
> Scientists are the ones who've been telling us about climate change for over a century now
Scientists were telling us that "vaccines are safe and effective". Well, statistics shows otherwise.
> In what way? You state this as if it's a fact, but this really depends on what kind of industry changes you're going to impose
The "climate change" agenda asks for huge societal changes in way humans operate vehicles and "emit CO2". This leads not to global impact and redistribution of income across large enterprises mining minerals for batteries, solar panels and sorts.
> But industry changes are normal
Undoubtedly so. Unless changes are non evolutional and incentivised.
> We're talking specifically about climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, caused by putting more CO2 in the atmosphere by burning more fossil fuels.
You cannot pull out "climate change" you like from climate change in general. Our planet is a very complex organism, in which we still have very little knowledge of how things are going on and what depends on what.
The only way to prudently approach the problem is to see available data across many years and try to make conclusions. It will void all fearmongering done by "activists" and "scientists" and politicians of sorts, that's why no-one does that preferring to hide behind scary predictions like "we all will drown in 10 years" which have no supporting whatsoever.
Oil lobby pushing legislation and profiteering from it is nothing new. It does exist - and so does "climate change" lobby.
Now you go ahead and label it as "misinformation" or something like that because it's important to deny logical thinking when someone tries to assess the "climate change". Otherwise inconvenient truth may come out indeed. Easier to do fearmongering.
I will not. Reality is important, and repeated denials of reality, like yours, are dangerous and can mislead people. You may call this condescending and emotional, but you're dancing around the fact that you lie and mislead people, and you don't want to be held accountable for that. You get no free pass from me.
> Scientists were telling us that "vaccines are safe and effective". Well, statistics shows otherwise.
Yeah, let's dodge into a completely different topic. But you're wrong here too. Vaccines have saved millions of lives. The effectiveness of vaccines has been well established for centuries. Small pox has been completely eradicated by vaccines. Polio nearly so. That doesn't mean every vaccine is equally effective, but many vaccines clearly are incredibly effective. It's people sowing unfounded doubt about this who are endangering the lives of millions of people now and in the future.
> The "climate change" agenda asks for huge societal changes in way humans operate vehicles and "emit CO2". This leads not to global impact and redistribution of income across large enterprises mining minerals for batteries, solar panels and sorts.
Did you mean to say it doesn't lead to global impact? Then what exactly are you complaining about?
The fact is, something having impact or consequences doesn't mean it's some sort of nefarious evil. It's a natural consequence of tackling problems, but also of new technologies and new opportunities. The invention of the car, the computer, and really every new product that comes to the market leads to "redistribution of income across large enterprises" because that's how capitalism works. I'm not opposed to tackling the problems of capitalism, but I don't want to do that at the cost of millions of lives.
> Unless changes are non evolutional and incentivised.
What the hell does that mean? Are you trying to hide your lack of real arguments behind vague but scary sounding phrases?
> Our planet is a very complex organism, in which we still have very little knowledge of how things are going on and what depends on what.
Which is why scientists have put a lot of effort into studying that. A lot. And so far, there's not a shred of evidence to cast any doubt on the theory that the greenhouse effect does indeed work on a global scale, like Graham Bell predicted over a century ago.
> The only way to prudently approach the problem is to see available data across many years and try to make conclusions.
We've done that.
But what's also prudent is to try to not cause dramatic changes to a complex system we barely understand, and yet that's exactly what we've been doing for the past centuries. We are having an impact on this complex system of Earth's climate, and we are destabilising it, and the fact that we don't fully understand all the complex intricacies yet, is no reason to just blindly continue destabilising it. The prudent thing would be to stop doing that. But that threatens the profits of the most powerful lobby on the planet.
> Oil lobby pushing legislation and profiteering from it is nothing new. It does exist - and so does "climate change" lobby.
Except the oil lobby is trying to protect their trillion dollar profits, whereas the climate lobby is trying to protect the planet. These are not the same.
> it's important to deny logical thinking when someone tries to assess the "climate change".
I was afraid you'd feel that way, but I'm surprised you're this honest about it.
I have tried to get you to think more critically and more logically about this issue, but if you really feel so strongly that it's important to you to reject logical thinking, then there's not much I can do for you. I just hope others who see this will care and not be drawn into your propaganda.
What a mix of arrogance and ignorance. My friend, you don't own the reality, neither you have right to baselessly accuse anyone of lying. You don't own the truth either. Stop imagining yourself as saviour of humanity, you are nowhere near that.
> Yeah, let's dodge into a completely different topic.
Don't pretend like you didn't understand the message.
> Except the oil lobby is trying to protect their trillion dollar profits, whereas the climate lobby is trying to protect the planet. These are not the same.
This got me laughing hard. Nobody gives a shit about the Planet - you may want to look at "climate change" scam preachers - they use private jets that emit a lot of so hated CO2 while preaching everyone needs to drive electric vehicle. Just follow the money - don't follow what they preach. To believe all those Al Gores want to save the planet is either naive or stupid. I'll let you pick the category of your liking.
All all those conferences, promos that they do and to which they fly on private jets where flight expenditures cost 50k to anywhere above few thousands - who pays all those expenses you think?
I don't expect any coherence from you, but if someone who will read this and still not convinced it's a scam I suggest to have a look what "climate change" preachers were preaching and predicting 10-15-20-30 years ago and how many of those predictions have happened. I'll save you time - it's zero. But don't trust me, do you own research.
> We are having an impact on this complex system of Earth's climate, and we are destabilising it
You are thinking too much of yourself. Nothing is "destabilising" it, this Planet allegedly existed over 4.6bn years, and likely will exist more.
> I have tried to get you to think more critically and more logically about this issue
Congratulations - you have "caught" me on mistype. Glad you enjoyed it. One thing - please don't use "critical thinking" without knowing what that means. Labelling "propaganda", "misinformation", "lies" is exactly opposite of that and you know it well.
But neither do you. Reality exists independently from either of us, but only one of us seems to be paying attention to it.
> neither you have right to baselessly accuse anyone of lying.
I'm not doing it baselessly, though. All of the things you've said that I've called out as lies, are lies, blatant untruths, and/or have been thoroughly debunked.
> Don't pretend like you didn't understand the message.
The message that you're not limiting yourself to just one debunked conspiracy theory? Yeah, I got that.
> Nobody gives a shit about the Planet
Don't project your own cynicism on others.
> you may want to look at "climate change" scam preachers - they use private jets
No, those are the oil executives, as well as hypocrites who love to pretend to be doing good while only being in it for attention. The actual climate activists don't fly by private jets, and many of them rarely or never fly at all. I'm not exactly on the forefront of climate activism, but even I haven't flown in years.
You're only paying attention to the rich and famous, and not to the real people on the ground.
You're only paying attention to the hypocrites and think you're pointing out something new when you say they're hypocrites, but everybody knows that already. But because the hypocrites are talking about the environment, you conclude that everybody who talks about the environment must be a hypocrite, and therefore it must be false, but that's not how logic works. There are hypocrites talking about every topic, including yours, but that doesn't make every person on Earth a hypocrite or every topic false.
You're clutching at your own selection bias to prove your own strawman. But the only one who falls for that backwards logic is you.
> I suggest to have a look what "climate change" preachers were preaching and predicting 10-15-20-30 years ago and how many of those predictions have happened. I'll save you time - it's zero. But don't trust me, do you own research.
I'm sure you've cherry-picked your own selection of outrageous claims to prove your point, but if you actually did your research honestly, you'd see it's not zero. Many predictions have come true.
A small selection:
* Temperatures are rising. This has been quite thoroughly documented. I think the past 8 years are the 8 hottest years on record. Most of the hottest years on record have happened since 1998.
* Glaciers are melting. Lots of glaciers are significantly smaller or have disappeared completely.
* Sea ice is melting. North Pole ice is smaller and smaller every year.
* Weather is getting less stable. Some areas get unprecedented floods, others extreme draughts. Blizzards in Texas, balmy weather on the North Pole.
Of course there have been alarmists who turned the thing into a caricature, but those have always been called out as nonsense.
> Nothing is "destabilising" it, this Planet allegedly existed over 4.6bn years, and likely will exist more.
Read more carefully. The climate is destabilising. Not the planet. Nobody is saying the planet will explode. That's even beyond the more usual nonsense caricatures.
Unlike you, I never claimed it.
> All of the things you've said that I've called out as lies, are lies, blatant untruths, and/or have been thoroughly debunked.
As usual, there is no proof of "debunking".
> No, those are the oil executives, as well as hypocrites who love to pretend to be doing good while only being in it for attention
Normally I should have stopped long ago as I normally don't entertain religious fanatics. "Climate change" scam advocates are perfectly fitting your description of hypocrites as to best of my knowledge none of them follows their preachings. It's all entertainment for dumb crowd.
> You're only paying attention to the rich and famous, and not to the real people on the ground.
I am talking about "climate change" preachers. They don't follow what they preach. Certainly some people do follow those preachings, but I have nothing more than pity for them.
> I'm sure you've cherry-picked your own selection of outrageous claims to prove your point, but if you actually did your research honestly, you'd see it's not zero. Many predictions have come true.
I like how you are trying to project your ways of discussion on me :) Says a lot. Just a reminder - I didn't "cherry pick" anything for anyone who can read and encouraged doing their own research. Sapienti sat.
> A small selection:
Your selection is "water is wet". It's not a selection.
> Weather is getting less stable. Some areas get unprecedented floods, others extreme draughts
And this one is outright lie. There is no data supporting it. Droughts, floods happened there over course of history. Just because ww have internet now and can read about it and see photos on Instagram doesn't make it any "less stable". Although I think you know it and just trying to deceive to push your narrative.
> The climate is destabilising
I would ask what this nonsensical sentence means but sorry I have no time to prolong this discussion. Wishing you all the best
(Global renewables investment is hovering around $1.5T/year)
People have forgotten that you used to have to power wash buildings yearly in the Northeast from all the coal pollution. Natgas is NOT perfect, but it's about as good as fossil fuels can be - no tailings, no ash piles, easy to transport via pipeline.
I still think Offshore Wind is going to get us to the finish line though. It acts a lot more like baseload generation than onshore.
Most of the energy used by a car goes into producing wasted heat (power plants are much better at winning back useful energy from that heat). Most of the rest of the energy used by a car goes into moving the weight of the car itself. Only a tiny part goes into moving the actual occupants of the car. That's why even electric cars are still wasteful: they're still too big and heavy and moving their own weight around. Bikes or mass transit are far more efficient. But EVs are still more efficient than ICE vehicles, even if the energy they use is dirty.
The major oil producing nations are not going to stop selling oil though, they depend on it to survive, and likewise developing nations depend on petroleum products to feed themselves and operate their businesses. They can't afford to transition in any timespan that matters for a critical climate change scenario.
What we're on course to do in the West is destroy our economies for no reason as carbon usage will just move elsewhere. In the process we will lose our ability to lead to cleaner technologies by destroying our financial base.
Have you noticed the decline in the stock market?
The US made a hard turn towards green energy the day Biden got into office. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline on day 1, and has been running an aggressively anti-oil energy policy, which the EU is following as well. This has caused inflation to spread across the supply chain as input costs have drastically increased. Oil products are vital for food production too, so it's affecting that as well.
This isn't just an update to a basically disposable cell phone, these policy changes have huge impacts, such that we can't even fully know ahead of time the unintended consequences.
And the US definitely needs to be first. The US uses far more carbon per person than any other country; even more than Europe. Developing countries are not remotely in the same order of magnitude.
Having the US and EU transition to cleaner energy will be a massive boon to the world, even if nobody else follows suit. But the US and EU figuring out all the issues of this transition will make it easier for other countries to make that transition too, and it will put more pressure on them to do so.
The US is really not the country that should wait for others to go first here. Take the lead.
No one is saying green technologies are bad, they aren't. The question is the scope. If we ask them to do something they're not technologically and economically ready to do they're going to fail.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles
[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/
Edit-I figure in a perfect universe we’d have chargers at every likely to be used parking spot and they’d charge in accordance to power availability and the duration a person is likely to be there. So at work you’d plug in, the charger would know you’ll be there for a considerable amount of time, and maybe you wouldn’t get 6.6 kWh the whole duration but you’ll wind up at 80% (or whatever you requested) by the end of the shift. Similar with apartments. Costco or big box stores would assume you’d be there for 1-2 hours and would offer faster charging for those coming in from greater distances. Etc. it’s not impossible. This could ameliorate generation changes over time.
Apartment complexes and residentials could use this instead of on-site batteries to make use of their solar generation.
The grid already handles high peaks. There's plenty of unused capacity outside of the 6pm-10pm peak of the Duck Curve. Cars support scheduling charging, so even if you come home at 6pm and want to plug in without thinking about it, you can (and note that a modern BEV used for commuting needs to be plugged only once a week). If you charge at work, it's even better, because that's at the bottom of the Duck Curve when you could almost get paid to get the electricity off the grid. Fast DC charging sites often already have large battery storage built-in, because it's already more profitable to use lower-power grid connection and/or off-peak electricity.
Going electric decouples fuel use from power use allowing your vehicle to run off whatever fuel source is available even garbage [1]. Power generation can transition to renewables without replacing existing vehicles.
With enough batteries in circulation recycling turns into a circular economy with batteries being high grade ore.
Electric vehicles allow energy independence because of fuel agility even if emissions are no better, but because of the agility allows less painful transitions to better energy sources.
[1] https://pinellas.gov/waste-to-energy-facility/
anecdotally, in Australia, every EV user (that I know of) have exactly that.
Solar panels are often considered the first step in getting an EV
https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...
Two issues, the first one small and improving : the smelting is energy expensive and does polute a lot. We're improving fast though, now that material scientific research got more credits.
The big one: as we use more and more minerals, it's harder to find ore as easely accessible or as concentrated. If in the next decade we manage to build tidal/solar mining rigs, I'll be more optimistic about the future.
They are a bridge towards lowering emissions but they cannot get us to zero or negative emissions. For as long as they are in use cars will simply remain "part of the problem". Acutely, personal vehicles used for quotidian trips are a large part of the contribution towards carbon emissions and can easily be phased out with improved urban and residential design patterns, public/collective transport infrastructure, and low-tech solutions like bikes, draft animals, etc .
Batteries are still made as cells. Need one for a car? Put 10,000 together. Need one for an e-bike? Put 10-20 together. Need one for a scooter? Put 5-10 together.
Cell economics are generally the same.
Furthermore, you can make the battery in an ebike or scooter removable and recharge it at work or at a friend's house. No gasoline stink. Or you can make the scooter/blade foldable and haul it in. Again, no gasoline stink.
For urban transport, BEV scaling provides the opportunity to affordably enable these energy efficient modes better than stinky dirty two stroke crap.
I think what can also happen is that you buy a city car with a 100 mile range, but if you need to go far, you rent an "extension battery", maybe a very energy efficient trailer, or even an ICE range extender. Or maybe it just attaches to the back of the vehicle, or if the battery is swappable, you swap in a rentable long range one.
And remember, don't concentrate on current battery economics. Between higher density sodium ion + LFP, sulfur chemistries, solid state, and maybe lithium air batteries, densities will go up by 2-3x in the next ten years. That means less materials, lighter vehicles / battery "rocket equation" for more range from a lighter battery with the same power storage, etc.
Zero or negative emissions is perfect being the enemy of bad. BEVs are an enormous opportunity to mitigate massive amounts of emissions AND be a better product that is cheaper for people.
There does not exist a practical political path to zero emissions right now, as much as it pains me to say so.
What we do need (and there is some political opportunity to do so) is massive funding of BEV transporation at all levels / form factors. There should be a 300-500$ price credit (phasing out 10% per year) for scooters and ebikes to get them prevalent. Make them stupid cheap to adopt.
Fund the hell out of battery development. Double down on all the national lab work on batteries (that lithium air paper recently was nice, we should see stuff like that out of every single national lab).
To me the two solutions revolve around simple battery tech.
1. Charging stations like we have now but 100x as many.
2. Battery swap stations a la Nio in China. In their system you buy the car (for pretty cheap) and rent the battery. Makes upfront cost cheaper and batteries need replacing anyway so if you can swap batteries easily you never have to worry about this.
On the flip side, on most days it would be much more hassle to spend 10 minutes or so refueling my ICE car instead of just driving home, connecting my EV and let it charge overnight.
Granted, I have a property that allows the installation of a charger. But so do basically all suburban Americans, many people in cities and around the world. People that live so urban that owning their own charging infrastructure is impractical are probably better served with public transport, anyway.
Charging with electricity is 10x easier remote than gas.
And makes you independent.
https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/kangoo-z-e-...
Let's see I still think H2 handling is a little bit more risky
You should probably read this:
https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...
I used to think it was risky as well, given Hindenburg, Challenger and all. The reality is that it's no more risky than gasoline, it's just different.
This is who EVs are for: People who own houses in the suburbs.
They don't work in cities. They don't work in rural areas. They don't work for renters.
EVs are for people who own houses in the suburbs.
Would imply that Europe hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Sure large urban areas have decent mass transit. Many people still live in smaller towns, villages or suburbs and commute by car everyday. Especially in larger more decentralized countries like Germany.
in every country included 60-70% commute by car. Which is barely lower than it is in the US. I think it’s a myth that Western Europe is significantly ahead (and I think it applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to other areas like health and education). The grass is always greener on the other side of the ocean…
The big problem is that everything in the US has been designed around extreme car dependency, and more than that: extreme gas consumption. Because American cars are also much larger and heavier than they reasonably should be. Much about how American life seems to have been explicitly designed to maximise oil use and oil profits, even to the point where it stops making any kind of sense.
So if there's a reason this can't change, then it's because oil companies hold far too much power over American politics and over the way people think.
See also the recent conspiracy protests against "15 minute cities". The only meaningful reason I can think of why anyone would oppose that, is because it's going to hurt oil profits.
The tricky part is getting someone else to take the first step -- there's going to be a lot of changes if we really want to do this, and most people seems firmly convinced that someone else should take the lead.
But you're absolutely right there's no single silver bullet. The problem is big and complex, and so is the solution. Smaller cars, less cars, electric cars, more bike infrastructure, better public transport, better designed cities. All of those things are part of the solution.
Of course most of this is about urban areas; rural areas have very different requirements, and some of these solutions are irrelevant or infeasible there. Cities can do without cars, rural areas probably not, which is part of why electric cars are still important.
And how do groceries get to the vast network of local stores ?
Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe. There's a reason our US friends measure travel in time taken, and not distance travelled. The number of shops needed to "locally supply" everybody would be gigantic.
The more stores that needs to be supplied, the more trucks needs to drive around supplying them, which leads to the question; what pollutes the most ?
If humanity wants to make an improvement, we need much more public transportation, and not like today where it's "once per hour unless you live downtown", but in a way that doesn't make a 30 minute trip take 90 minutes. If we manage that, it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.
To give an impression of the size difference, the Netherlands covers an area of 16,160 sq mi (41,850 km2), and New York State alone covers 54,556 square miles (141,300 km2), and New York State is the 27th largest state in the US.
> My grocery store (in Amsterdam) is a 5 minute walk
And how many of those groceries are produced in Amsterdam ? Each an every one has been transported on one or more trucks to arrive in a convenient walking distance to you. I fully agree and understand that shops needs to be local, but they're not the most environmentally friendly solution.
> Besides that the US is a MUCH larger country than the NL, distances in the US are also much greater than anything you can imagine in Europe.
Of course, but how is that relevant? The fact that a country is larger doesn't mean that you have to make people travel all that distance. Imagine the EU merges into a single country at some point. That's not going to change the logistical situation around Amsterdam in any way. Logistics is already very international in the EU.
> what pollutes the most?
Yeah, what pollutes the most? Lots of trucks driving to a central big store, and then having people drive even more cars to that central store, or driving all those trucks to smaller local stores that people walk to? For the smaller shops, you probably don't need big trucks, but smaller ones, which does mean more of them, but still not remotely as many as the cars your saving. And some delivery trucks in Amsterdam are pretty light and electric already.
> it doesn't really matter how far away the grocery store is.
It still does. Mind you, more public transport is absolutely vital. I totally agree with that. And Amsterdam has pretty decent public transport (though biking is generally faster), but I still prefer local shops.
I lived in Russia for a while, in a city in the middle of Siberia, and there is a night and day difference between how people live.
Russia is even larger than the US, but living in single-family detached homes is just not very common. So, most things tend to be within walking distance. And public transport is much more effective.
To some extent, the larger vehicle size is a result of US vehicle safety standards.
One of the only things that makes SUVs safer is their greater mass, which largely serves to make the road less safe for collisions with non-SUV drivers. With regard to vehicle size, I observed back in the 1990s when the SUV craze began that America was in a war of size attrition with itself.
Even a Mini Cooper is quite survivable in a crash. Crumple zones and airbags are not just standard issue on gargantuan vehicles.
Trucks have different safety standards than cars, and car manufacturers find the car safety standards annoying, so they started marketing trucks to consumers. They don't have to obey the same regulations as cars, and yet because they're light trucks, they don't require a commercial driving license. That's the loophole through which the US car industry managed to drive their entire industry.
You say this as though we have any choice. It will happen; we can either do it ourselves, or we can wait until environmental collapse does it for us.
(I know which way I'd have preferred to go, but I seem to have been outvoted...)
I guess it depends what you mean by mass transit but communal, shared transportation solutions that replace private vehicle ownership. Yeah, that's simple.
If all energy for making ev comes from renewable.
Is there a reason that a large part of that could not come from renewables ?
There is literally nothing that we can do with Gas/Oil that we cannot do with electricity, or by extension by converting that electricity in to solid fuels like hydrogen or Power-2-X.
Normally, by the laws of thermodynamics, you cannot extract more energy than you put in a system, but since the energy for renewables is from external sources (mostly derived by the sun/gravity), that means we can severely reduce our CO2 emissions, or even start extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
1kg of hydrogen has about 36 kWh worth of energy in it, and it requires roughly 50kWh to produce it, which is a bad deal if those 50kWh comes from gas/oil/coal, but if instead they come from excess solar/wind/hydroelectric energy, you're essentially gaining 36 kWh worth of energy that would otherwise be "lost".
1) Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
2) Accept that people are not going to stop using cars, and work with what you have, unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle, or you are able to invent something they will actually want more than cars.
I think it's important to realize that "People will always use cars" and "We can and should reduce car usage" are not contradictory. We need to both offer and incentivize alternatives, find ways to reduce car dependency, etc and make sure that remaining car usage is as clean as possible. (This applies to both the car usage that we can get rid of in the mid- to long-term but haven't yet and the "residual" car usage that we can't seem to get rid of.)
This is what I meant by "a bridge." I don't think you really understand the point of my comment.
> unless you have a mysterious power making you able to compel mankind to change their lifestyle
I know you are being facetious but I ironically, yes there is a mysterious power that compels mankind to change their lifestyle. That's how we got here; it's not like the enclosure and industrialization was a grassroots effort or an accidental happenstance. Its called the industrial revolution for a reason. The truth is it was directed by a privileged minority with a lot of power. It was not done democratically. It certainly wasn't privileged consumers saying, "hey I want to give up generational farming of inherited land to live in an urban slum and work in textile mill". Their hands were forced by policy and in some cases violence. Societies are reticent and often reactionary. When that reluctance endangers the progress of the governing interests (capital here for all intents and purposes) suddenly "mysterious power"s become less fun to talk about.
But hey you don't have to listen to me; it also doesn't matter what we think anyways because like I'm saying its not like there is much personal choice in this shift -- unless youre in the really upper echelons, I guess then you can do whatever you want.
If you reduce disposable income massively in line with the rest of the world, then they won't be able to afford private vehicles and the change will come naturally.
People seem to have forgotten that government, trade, and economic policies enabled the status quo and it will be used (we can actually see it already is) to modify it. It's pretty hard to justify whining about your pampered lifestyle when the next folks can't even afford to eat.
Forgetting for a second food and agriculture (the biggest problem in carbon pollution that no one likes to talk about), it's no secret that the up front cost of an EV is higher, even with subsidies. It shouldn't be hard to imagine the logical continuation of that concept, extended through to supply chains from chips all the way to raw minerals.
This is the main reason why I sold my Tesla and went back to my horse and buggy.
Let’s say Germany halves its CO2 output in 25 years instead. What does that mean? Does it mean we should all stop buying EVs now and just buy combustion engine vehicles for eternity? Nope.
The second biggest concern is mining for the lithium used in EVs, which hopefully soon will be a much smaller concern as Sodium batteries become the norm. Again, there is a risk we could still be mining lithium in 20 years, but it's a risk rather than a certainty.
Most "excess power" for EV's comes from fossil fuel -- that is, given our current power infrastructure and supply of clean energy, when add power demand from more EV's... that supply is mostly coming from natural gas (maybe some coal too, yikes).
EV energy lifecycle is roughly: (0) recover/frack/process natural gas out of ground and transport to power station (1) Burn natural gas to make electrical energy, (2) transmit electricity to charging station... which has transmission loss, (3) charge EV... which has loss, (4) discharge energy from battery to motors...which has loss, (5) convert electrical power to mechanical power to the wheels in the motor... which has loss.
Internal combustion engine (ICE) energy lifecycle is: (0) recover crude oil and refine crude to fuel, transport to gas station (1) fill car... very low energy loss, much lower than charge dishcarge of EV's (2) burn fuel in ICE
Thermodynamic efficiency of burning natural gas is about 45-55% depending upon plant design. There are transmission and charge/discharge/conversion losses associated with getting the electricity to EV's and using it.
Burning petrol fuels in an ICE is about 30-35% efficient in modern engines. There are higher carbon associated with recovering and processing crude oil relative to natural gas.
When discussing fossil fuel power plants: natural gas plants are about 2x to 2.5x more carbon efficient than coal or other fossil fuel plants on mass of CO2 per kWh generated.
I'm not going to run detailed numbers but more than 10x carbon operating efficiency for EV's over ICE's is high. I think the operational efficiency benefit is only 2-3x, which is still a lot. I also think these studies are probably under reporting energy requirements for EV battery production because so much of the supply chain is in the developing world or China and it is hard to get accurate data.
That all being said, EV's are a big part of our future and part of the solution toward building a more energy efficient world.