5 ms·

What I am worried about is, all the work done to make affordable electric car will go in vain if gas prices reduce due to the adoption of electric vehicle and h

What I am worried about is, all the work done to make affordable electric car will go in vain if gas prices reduce due to the adoption of electric vehicle and hence ultimately no effect on co2 emission.

devoply 10y ago
All the gasoline in the ground will eventually be burned by people regardless of price. It's a question of how quickly. If not by first world countries then by third world countries. As far as I know the CO2 stays there once it is there and accumulates, so does it really matter how fast it's burned?
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Co2 sinks include: 1.- equilibriation with oceans (10 year timescale increases system capacity by order of magnitude - but harmful to marine life) 2. - hydrocarbon/peat formation (not really a major process in an icehouse climate and quite slow anyway) 3. - marine carbonate formation (100 year timescale, potentially very large sink, can be negatively affected by process 1) 4.- silicate weathering (1000 year timescale infinite capacity). So rate of release is very important. If CO2 release too fast ocean acidification from 1 prevents 3 and 3 and 4 don't have time to act.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- nhaehnle 10y ago
  I think this is a fair question, and deserves an answer instead of being downvoted. 1. There's no gasoline in the ground, but various forms of oil. Sounds like a nitpick, but is actually crucial, because getting usable fuel from tar sands and fracking are dirty and expensive operations -- especially once the externalities of environmental damage is accounted for. With current trends in wind and solar, it is quite likely that at some point, extracting fuel from tar sands and fracking will simply no longer be competitive. (You may argue that things like planes are unlikely to ever go electric; but it's likely we'll at some point have scalable fuel generation from electricity.) 2. CO2 doesn't necessarily stay in the atmosphere. First of all, there are natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in the ground/the oceans. That's how oil and coal formed in the first place. Of course, those natural processes are slower than we'd like. That's why carbon sequestration is a seriously discussed thing, i.e. filter CO2 out of the atmosphere industrially, and/or speed up the natural processes (like growing forests). Creating an economic incentive for this is a big part of the idea of carbon emissions trading. In the end, it's viable to have a neutral economy in terms of CO2. We really need that anyway in the long term because oil is finite. If we get there faster, we'll get there without having gotten all oil out of the ground.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Oil is a wonderful product that is a key ingredient to many industries. It is used in manufacturing so many things -plastics, organic chemistry ingredients and even fertilizer; e.g. your shampoo bottle needed oil to make both the shampoo and the bottle itself. At the moment, oil is so extremely cheap that we simply burn most of it. However, once we switch to other means of energy, we'll likely want to use all that oil in different ways with don't involve burning it and the CO2 stays in the products made from that oil (even if it means getting buried in a dump after some time).
- pjc50 10y ago
  There are balancing processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so if we could stretch out the oil extraction over a couple of centuries we'd be in a much better position.
tempestn 10y ago
As demand for gas (oil) goes down, or even as projected future demand goes down, it will make less sense to invest in extraction, which should counteract that drop in price at least to some extent. Also eventually filling stations will become less common. I could see some downward pressure on fuel prices, but I expect other effects will outweigh it, and adoption of electric vehicles will accelerate.
ajkjk 10y ago
I suspect that electric vehicles are just a much better product, and will end up dominant regardless as long as the technical challenges keep being solved.
astrodust 10y ago
Electric vehicles will ultimately become more convenient and will win on that basis alone. Electric car designs can be more flexible, and performance will continue to increase above and beyond the already ludicrous levels in some Tesla models. When you think about gasoline engines they're terribly inconvenient. They need a lot of maintenance. They have tons of finicky moving parts. They need gasoline, which is only sold at select retailers, and the price of gasoline changes constantly, often spiking higher without warning. It's only because this enormous infrastructure has built up around gasoline-powered cars that any of that is bearable. Can you imagine gasoline-powered cars trying to make inroads in a world that was historically all-electric? It'd be absurd. Somehow electric cars are gaining market share even when going against tradition, so it seems inevitable they'll hit some tipping point and gasoline will be considered the exotic, difficult to obtain fuel. When people can charge their car overnight for free with a wind-turbine, or on the weekend with a solar roof they'll have little reason to prefer gasoline powered cars.
- gambiting 10y ago
  There's loads of people who live in places which conceivably won't have the ability to charge electric cars, ever. Terraced houses in the UK - you have to park on the street, and the spaces are not marked - sometimes you can fit 30 cars on one side, sometimes 40, depending on how and what people park. Sometimes you park in front of your own front door, sometimes you have to park in a parallel street because maybe the neighbour has visitors and there's no more room. How do we solve that? Have 40 charging points on each side of every residential street in the UK? Not only would that be ugly as a sin, but also hideously expensive.
  - apercu 10y ago
    Sure. There's also loads of people (millions and millions) that live in rural and suburban US and and Canada that could very easily install a charger in their garage or driveway. Don't ~~show~~ throw the baby out with the bathwater.
  - cocoflunchy 10y ago
    How about driving to the nearest charging station?

devoply 10y ago

All the gasoline in the ground will eventually be burned by people regardless of price. It's a question of how quickly. If not by first world countries then by third world countries. As far as I know the CO2 stays there once it is there and accumulates, so does it really matter how fast it's burned?

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
Co2 sinks include: 1.- equilibriation with oceans (10 year timescale increases system capacity by order of magnitude - but harmful to marine life) 2. - hydrocarbon/peat formation (not really a major process in an icehouse climate and quite slow anyway) 3. - marine carbonate formation (100 year timescale, potentially very large sink, can be negatively affected by process 1) 4.- silicate weathering (1000 year timescale infinite capacity). So rate of release is very important. If CO2 release too fast ocean acidification from 1 prevents 3 and 3 and 4 don't have time to act.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
nhaehnle 10y ago
I think this is a fair question, and deserves an answer instead of being downvoted. 1. There's no gasoline in the ground, but various forms of oil. Sounds like a nitpick, but is actually crucial, because getting usable fuel from tar sands and fracking are dirty and expensive operations -- especially once the externalities of environmental damage is accounted for. With current trends in wind and solar, it is quite likely that at some point, extracting fuel from tar sands and fracking will simply no longer be competitive. (You may argue that things like planes are unlikely to ever go electric; but it's likely we'll at some point have scalable fuel generation from electricity.) 2. CO2 doesn't necessarily stay in the atmosphere. First of all, there are natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in the ground/the oceans. That's how oil and coal formed in the first place. Of course, those natural processes are slower than we'd like. That's why carbon sequestration is a seriously discussed thing, i.e. filter CO2 out of the atmosphere industrially, and/or speed up the natural processes (like growing forests). Creating an economic incentive for this is a big part of the idea of carbon emissions trading. In the end, it's viable to have a neutral economy in terms of CO2. We really need that anyway in the long term because oil is finite. If we get there faster, we'll get there without having gotten all oil out of the ground.
PeterisP 10y ago
Oil is a wonderful product that is a key ingredient to many industries. It is used in manufacturing so many things -plastics, organic chemistry ingredients and even fertilizer; e.g. your shampoo bottle needed oil to make both the shampoo and the bottle itself. At the moment, oil is so extremely cheap that we simply burn most of it. However, once we switch to other means of energy, we'll likely want to use all that oil in different ways with don't involve burning it and the CO2 stays in the products made from that oil (even if it means getting buried in a dump after some time).
pjc50 10y ago
There are balancing processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so if we could stretch out the oil extraction over a couple of centuries we'd be in a much better position.

tempestn 10y ago

As demand for gas (oil) goes down, or even as projected future demand goes down, it will make less sense to invest in extraction, which should counteract that drop in price at least to some extent. Also eventually filling stations will become less common. I could see some downward pressure on fuel prices, but I expect other effects will outweigh it, and adoption of electric vehicles will accelerate.

ajkjk 10y ago

I suspect that electric vehicles are just a much better product, and will end up dominant regardless as long as the technical challenges keep being solved.

astrodust 10y ago

Electric vehicles will ultimately become more convenient and will win on that basis alone. Electric car designs can be more flexible, and performance will continue to increase above and beyond the already ludicrous levels in some Tesla models. When you think about gasoline engines they're terribly inconvenient. They need a lot of maintenance. They have tons of finicky moving parts. They need gasoline, which is only sold at select retailers, and the price of gasoline changes constantly, often spiking higher without warning. It's only because this enormous infrastructure has built up around gasoline-powered cars that any of that is bearable. Can you imagine gasoline-powered cars trying to make inroads in a world that was historically all-electric? It'd be absurd. Somehow electric cars are gaining market share even when going against tradition, so it seems inevitable they'll hit some tipping point and gasoline will be considered the exotic, difficult to obtain fuel. When people can charge their car overnight for free with a wind-turbine, or on the weekend with a solar roof they'll have little reason to prefer gasoline powered cars.

gambiting 10y ago
There's loads of people who live in places which conceivably won't have the ability to charge electric cars, ever. Terraced houses in the UK - you have to park on the street, and the spaces are not marked - sometimes you can fit 30 cars on one side, sometimes 40, depending on how and what people park. Sometimes you park in front of your own front door, sometimes you have to park in a parallel street because maybe the neighbour has visitors and there's no more room. How do we solve that? Have 40 charging points on each side of every residential street in the UK? Not only would that be ugly as a sin, but also hideously expensive.
- apercu 10y ago
  Sure. There's also loads of people (millions and millions) that live in rural and suburban US and and Canada that could very easily install a charger in their garage or driveway. Don't ~~show~~ throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- cocoflunchy 10y ago
  How about driving to the nearest charging station?