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There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely

There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely sealed room, with an electric car. Both engines are running full blast. I want you to pick a door to open, and enter the room and shut the door behind you. You have to stay in the room you choose for one hour. You cannot turn off the engine. You do not get a gas mask. I'm guessing you chose the Door Number Two, with the electric car, right? Door number one is a fatal choice - who would ever want to breathe those fumes? This is the choice the world is making right now. The choices aren't that simple, Arnold, and the analogy you're making isn't valid, either. Does he not understand that that "clean" electric car requires an energy grid to run on? And that this grid is very far from "clean", and will be for quite some time? And that the process of creating (and decomissioning) electric cars is very far from environmentally harmless, also? I'm not saying that there's no positive trade-off in favor of electric cars; most likely there is. But fear-driven arguments (even if pointed in the "right" direction) don't help much, and have a similar effect on the brain as carbon monoxide, over time.

astrodust 11y ago
The point here is it's easier to control emissions at large-scale power generation plants than it is on millions of individual vehicles. How many cars would fail an inspection if exposed to one? The same cannot be said about power plants. There's also the renewable angle. Surplus wind power, as experienced in Spain, would basically provide free power for recharging vehicles overnight. You cannot do this with gasoline. The sealed room is also a way of presenting what we're doing to our climate, that the automobile emissions don't just go "into the air", but become part of the environment.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  I don't dispute the electric cars are, overall, clean. Just that the image that Arnold is promoting with his "Gedankenexperiment", per my quote above (that electric cars are somehow 100% clean and environmentally harmless) is simply false, anti-intellectual, and unscientific.
  - emmelaich 11y ago
    One of my thoughts was that if you enter the first room you're only poisoning yourself. If you enter the second you've already polluted areas and/or people that have no interested in your transport. Bit of a silly analogy though, as many are. Would not say that is 'anti-intellectual' though.
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    Edit: clean above should have been cleaner.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Like I said, I understand the tradeoffs, and agree that it looks like they'll tilt favorably to electric cars, in the longer run. My point is that the rhetoric Arnold is using is a classic form of what psychologists call "extremifying," i.e. presenting a danger or tradeoff as much more dangerous or binary than it really is -- in order to, you know, get people to "do the right thing". (Or perhaps because he can't really tell the difference). And in a world beset with ignorance, chronic attention deficit and a lack of critical thinking skills all around, this is not a good thing.

astrodust 11y ago

The point here is it's easier to control emissions at large-scale power generation plants than it is on millions of individual vehicles. How many cars would fail an inspection if exposed to one? The same cannot be said about power plants. There's also the renewable angle. Surplus wind power, as experienced in Spain, would basically provide free power for recharging vehicles overnight. You cannot do this with gasoline. The sealed room is also a way of presenting what we're doing to our climate, that the automobile emissions don't just go "into the air", but become part of the environment.

kafkaesq 11y ago
I don't dispute the electric cars are, overall, clean. Just that the image that Arnold is promoting with his "Gedankenexperiment", per my quote above (that electric cars are somehow 100% clean and environmentally harmless) is simply false, anti-intellectual, and unscientific.
- emmelaich 11y ago
  One of my thoughts was that if you enter the first room you're only poisoning yourself. If you enter the second you've already polluted areas and/or people that have no interested in your transport. Bit of a silly analogy though, as many are. Would not say that is 'anti-intellectual' though.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Edit: clean above should have been cleaner.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Like I said, I understand the tradeoffs, and agree that it looks like they'll tilt favorably to electric cars, in the longer run. My point is that the rhetoric Arnold is using is a classic form of what psychologists call "extremifying," i.e. presenting a danger or tradeoff as much more dangerous or binary than it really is -- in order to, you know, get people to "do the right thing". (Or perhaps because he can't really tell the difference). And in a world beset with ignorance, chronic attention deficit and a lack of critical thinking skills all around, this is not a good thing.