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This article is about petroleum-derived products, and cutting your carbon footprint by choosing alternatives. One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution"

This article is about petroleum-derived products, and cutting your carbon footprint by choosing alternatives. One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. It seems incredibly wasteful to massively build out green energy to continue to prop up a system where we all drive several-ton hunks of metal one mile to grab a coffee at a drive-thru. I see stock pictures of traffic jams [0] and just think that EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle. [0] https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/traffic-jam-in-los-angeles-picture-id140452002 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/traffic-jam-in-los-ange...

mwint 5y ago
Importantly, it’s a band-aid that consumers (especially in the US) can be convinced to want - EVs are fun to drive! Versus the “right” solution, which is near impossible to sell to the populace.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  EVs are going to drive out gasoline for very comparable reasons to digital cameras driving out film cameras. That's a win for CO2, a win for air pollution in cities (that may be shaving points off people's IQ and definitely is shaving years off their lives), and a win for fungibility of energy generation. As gasoline infrastructure withers, it will be a win for retaining progress; it will no longer be possible to go back. None of these things end car culture, but switching away from gasoline may help to de-fang it by reducing the macho attraction. If cars become just about getting from A to B, then alternatives may start to look more viable.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    It's also a win for reducing oil dependency for many nations. Many of the oil producing countries are not always the most savory characters, and energy independence is an important national security goal in itself
    - JulianMorrison 5y ago
      One which can be obtained the good way, or the bad way, yes. EVs will reduce pressure to allow damaging pipelines and shale oil.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  And perhaps more importantly, there isn’t miles of red tape and NIMBYism to overcome to be able to roll out EVs. I’m strongly in favor of nationwide electric rail, but I also know that accomplishing that will be nearly impossible short of the federal government steamrolling it through, which itself is unlikely due to oil and auto lobbying. So I see it as a sort of, “take what you can get” situation.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    I could see both those lobbies being much reduced after the EV changeover.
ya_throw 5y ago
>If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency I've spoken to a subset of EV proponents who would strongly disagree with this. They say that it's not feasible or even possible, or maybe even acceptable, to convince enough people to change their lifestyle this radically. Therefore, we need to just all buy EVs. Personally I agree with you, although the huge boost that continuing new development gives to my field as an engineer is undeniable.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I agree, the much better solution would be to reduce the cultural reliance on cars in general. Incentives for more work from home, more walkable and bikeable cities, more amenities locally, better public transport... Unfortunately at least in the US such changes are basically impossible due to the culture, at least currently. A generational die off or two might radically change that.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. The big problem we have with renewables right now is matching generation with demand. Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night? Electric cars don't have that problem. They're parked for most of the day, they need to be charged once a day or less, so they can be charged whenever renewable generation is available. Which makes deployment of renewables more economical, which means we get more of it. > If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. We can do two things at once. The biggest thing we can do to reduce vehicle miles traveled is to relax zoning near urban areas to allow higher density housing to be built closer to jobs. That works, it makes housing more affordable (which is independently good) and people waste less time commuting. It also takes years before the new housing is actually built and even then doesn't solve the entire problem. You can't replace last mile truck deliveries with higher density housing or mass transit; you need electric trucks. Nobody is going to build low ridership mass transit to the low density suburbs that already exist, and they're not all going to cease to exist. 100% of cars are not going away anytime in the next century, but making the large majority of new cars electric is feasible within the next few years. This is not a problem with a single solution. It's a problem with 100 solutions that each have a niche and you solve the problem best by deploying them all, each in the place where it makes the most sense.
- Matthias247 5y ago
  > Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night? Theres batteries for that. And you can even use your EV as an a battery for your solar panels.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - manicdee 5y ago
    Assuming you are able to plug your EV into a (bidirectional) charger during the day.
option 5y ago
We need more nuclear
- xwdv 5y ago
  This is the only solution I accept these days in any serious discussion about cutting carbon emissions. And yea I know about Chernobyl and Fuckushima, but we’re still better off dealing with focused problems like that instead of vague extinction level crisis.
  - option 5y ago
    Yeah, I know about Chernobyl too - I grew up there and my parents still work there (since 1987). Yes, it was a huge tragedy but it’s effects are hugely exaggerated by oil and gas lobbyists in US.
myself248 5y ago
It's a false dichotomy. We can BOTH build more green energy, and use some of it to displace fossil fuels from transportation. If you predicate the future on reducing car dependency, good luck. I mean it's a noble goal, but you're gonna be holding your breath a while. Cars are popular for a lot of reasons. Likewise trying to build enough solar panels for all the car-miles currently driven ends up being a mountain of solar indeed. So reducing the miles driven would ALSO be nice. But we have to start on both and push hard on both, because meeting in the middle will happen a lot sooner.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  > Cars are popular for a lot of reasons. And so is jetting off somewhere for holidays.. realistically we need to cut down so much to survive, but so far everyone is working on "it's future society's problem". Only when the threat of death was within weeks did humans actually react with lockdowns, etc...
  - mcguire 5y ago
    It's going to be interesting when we go back to the normal human behavior of dying within 50 miles of where we were born. I can see a lot of people posting on this forum telling their grandkids, "I actually saw the Eiffel Tower in person, once. Yes, really! There was this thing called 'tourism'."
    - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
      Well, governments quickness to full shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel bans across the world has made international travel much more less likely for myself, which sucks because I would've liked to see the world. So maybe that's happening more regardless.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Cars are popular for a lot of reasons Cars can be popular and not be a necessity for the majority of the population, and that will still drastically cut emission, pollution and traffic congestion.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though. Likely the market will speak at some point and oil / electricity will become too expensive for people to own houses in the suburbs, but it’ll be painful when so much of the suburbanites identity is tied around this false idea of being “left alone”. That, and the majority of Americans don’t even walk anymore, you can spend hours of driving without seeing someone walking to somewhere (as opposed to walking their dog), it’s insane.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though Europe where? Suburbs are mostly an American thing, and the closest equivalents in most European cities are dense-ish, and usually have some form of public transit connection. Many cases can be improved a lot, but it isn't even close to being comparable to the thoroughly unsustainable very low density American sprawl.
homo_nullius 5y ago
The bigger problem with EV revolution is carbon footprint of its side effects, e.g., extra emissions from producing and utilizing batteries, or extra particulates from tire wear due to weight of electric vehicles.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  Please explain why a Tesla Model 3 is negligibly heavier than a BMW 3 series.
  - homo_nullius 5y ago
    Explain why it's heavier? Because electric vehicles carry all the chemistry, while gasoline powered vehicles only carry carbon and hydrogen and take oxygen from the air. Or explain why the difference in weight is negligible? But it's not, electric vehicles are noticeably heavier, and vehicle weight is the primary driver of tire wear and road wear.
dheera 5y ago
> EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle. Bad urban planning in the US is arguably a bigger problem. Most people aren't rich enough to live within walkable distance of their nearest coffee shop, grocery store, and train station. Trains make you wait an hour outside in the cold wet rain without bathrooms while a mentally ill person harrasses you for half of the hour. Buses don't show up. Curb ramps don't have drainage, so you have wet socks. And the nearest actual bathroom is for "customers only" (at least for males). So people drive. It's unfortunate.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  Right. Oddly this is where our climate problems can meet our affordable housing problems: start building clusters of neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable and bikeable. These are in stupidly high demand, we just need more of them. Default to installing heat pumps, solar panels, and EV hookups. There's no silver bullets, but if the average person winds up driving X% fewer miles because they have the option to walk, that's a meaningful win.
dagmx 5y ago
I think it needs to be solved in multiple ways. Reduce the need for cars which will reduce the load on the grid if they're driven less. But move people to buy EV cars instead of ICE where they can't do away with having a car. Even if that still uses dirty energy sources, it's still cleaner than having ICE cars driving everywhere with their little inefficient engines, when a big power plant can do much more to be efficient. It also decouples energy sources in such a way that green energy can be built up to replace it without consumer disruption. It's a win win to move people to EVs, but it's not the only end goal for better climate policy
xapata 5y ago
Progress is better than design paralysis.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
If HN had a vote option that represented "I mostly agree with what you've written, but worry you're only saying it as half-garbled talking point designed to oppose something else that I support" it would get a lot of use from me. I applaud your support of walkable cities with robust public transportation infrastructure. I'm sad that it seems to mostly just be an echo of a decades long misinformation campaign against EVs rather than a positive and sincere suggestion to improve society. The phrase "if we were rational and serious" is a red flag. Rarely has that come up in climate change discussions without a whole bunch of (ironically) irrational assumptions attached to it. Oh if only those silly greens had been more rational! What amazing progress we could have made on this problem. Are we all supposed to pretend that lots of serious (acting) figures on the, let's say, non-green side didn't openly and blatantly lie about it not being a problem and all the solutions being cons long after everyone knew this was what they were doing? If I was to come up with a list of things that were not rational or serious "pretend climate change is not happening" would come way before "let's stop using internal combustion engines in crowded cities because we have cheaper, better, quieter, healthier alternatives readily available".
mkoubaa 5y ago
People want to drive one mile for coffee and there is nothing you or any government can do about it. It's th unfortunate truth
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
The problem is made harder by the fact dense populations of humans sucks. It increases aggressive, conflict and indifference to other people. Crime is always higher. Dealing with infectous disease is harder. You'd never convince me to live in a city. Especially while rearing a child. The coffee shop will always be a mile if not 5 or 10 from me.

mwint 5y ago

Importantly, it’s a band-aid that consumers (especially in the US) can be convinced to want - EVs are fun to drive! Versus the “right” solution, which is near impossible to sell to the populace.

JulianMorrison 5y ago
EVs are going to drive out gasoline for very comparable reasons to digital cameras driving out film cameras. That's a win for CO2, a win for air pollution in cities (that may be shaving points off people's IQ and definitely is shaving years off their lives), and a win for fungibility of energy generation. As gasoline infrastructure withers, it will be a win for retaining progress; it will no longer be possible to go back. None of these things end car culture, but switching away from gasoline may help to de-fang it by reducing the macho attraction. If cars become just about getting from A to B, then alternatives may start to look more viable.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  It's also a win for reducing oil dependency for many nations. Many of the oil producing countries are not always the most savory characters, and energy independence is an important national security goal in itself
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    One which can be obtained the good way, or the bad way, yes. EVs will reduce pressure to allow damaging pipelines and shale oil.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
And perhaps more importantly, there isn’t miles of red tape and NIMBYism to overcome to be able to roll out EVs. I’m strongly in favor of nationwide electric rail, but I also know that accomplishing that will be nearly impossible short of the federal government steamrolling it through, which itself is unlikely due to oil and auto lobbying. So I see it as a sort of, “take what you can get” situation.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  I could see both those lobbies being much reduced after the EV changeover.

ya_throw 5y ago

>If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency I've spoken to a subset of EV proponents who would strongly disagree with this. They say that it's not feasible or even possible, or maybe even acceptable, to convince enough people to change their lifestyle this radically. Therefore, we need to just all buy EVs. Personally I agree with you, although the huge boost that continuing new development gives to my field as an engineer is undeniable.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I agree, the much better solution would be to reduce the cultural reliance on cars in general. Incentives for more work from home, more walkable and bikeable cities, more amenities locally, better public transport... Unfortunately at least in the US such changes are basically impossible due to the culture, at least currently. A generational die off or two might radically change that.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. The big problem we have with renewables right now is matching generation with demand. Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night? Electric cars don't have that problem. They're parked for most of the day, they need to be charged once a day or less, so they can be charged whenever renewable generation is available. Which makes deployment of renewables more economical, which means we get more of it. > If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. We can do two things at once. The biggest thing we can do to reduce vehicle miles traveled is to relax zoning near urban areas to allow higher density housing to be built closer to jobs. That works, it makes housing more affordable (which is independently good) and people waste less time commuting. It also takes years before the new housing is actually built and even then doesn't solve the entire problem. You can't replace last mile truck deliveries with higher density housing or mass transit; you need electric trucks. Nobody is going to build low ridership mass transit to the low density suburbs that already exist, and they're not all going to cease to exist. 100% of cars are not going away anytime in the next century, but making the large majority of new cars electric is feasible within the next few years. This is not a problem with a single solution. It's a problem with 100 solutions that each have a niche and you solve the problem best by deploying them all, each in the place where it makes the most sense.

Matthias247 5y ago
> Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night? Theres batteries for that. And you can even use your EV as an a battery for your solar panels.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- manicdee 5y ago
  Assuming you are able to plug your EV into a (bidirectional) charger during the day.

option 5y ago

We need more nuclear

xwdv 5y ago
This is the only solution I accept these days in any serious discussion about cutting carbon emissions. And yea I know about Chernobyl and Fuckushima, but we’re still better off dealing with focused problems like that instead of vague extinction level crisis.
- option 5y ago
  Yeah, I know about Chernobyl too - I grew up there and my parents still work there (since 1987). Yes, it was a huge tragedy but it’s effects are hugely exaggerated by oil and gas lobbyists in US.

myself248 5y ago

It's a false dichotomy. We can BOTH build more green energy, and use some of it to displace fossil fuels from transportation. If you predicate the future on reducing car dependency, good luck. I mean it's a noble goal, but you're gonna be holding your breath a while. Cars are popular for a lot of reasons. Likewise trying to build enough solar panels for all the car-miles currently driven ends up being a mountain of solar indeed. So reducing the miles driven would ALSO be nice. But we have to start on both and push hard on both, because meeting in the middle will happen a lot sooner.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
> Cars are popular for a lot of reasons. And so is jetting off somewhere for holidays.. realistically we need to cut down so much to survive, but so far everyone is working on "it's future society's problem". Only when the threat of death was within weeks did humans actually react with lockdowns, etc...
- mcguire 5y ago
  It's going to be interesting when we go back to the normal human behavior of dying within 50 miles of where we were born. I can see a lot of people posting on this forum telling their grandkids, "I actually saw the Eiffel Tower in person, once. Yes, really! There was this thing called 'tourism'."
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    Well, governments quickness to full shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel bans across the world has made international travel much more less likely for myself, which sucks because I would've liked to see the world. So maybe that's happening more regardless.
sofixa 5y ago
> Cars are popular for a lot of reasons Cars can be popular and not be a necessity for the majority of the population, and that will still drastically cut emission, pollution and traffic congestion.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though. Likely the market will speak at some point and oil / electricity will become too expensive for people to own houses in the suburbs, but it’ll be painful when so much of the suburbanites identity is tied around this false idea of being “left alone”. That, and the majority of Americans don’t even walk anymore, you can spend hours of driving without seeing someone walking to somewhere (as opposed to walking their dog), it’s insane.

sofixa 5y ago
> Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though Europe where? Suburbs are mostly an American thing, and the closest equivalents in most European cities are dense-ish, and usually have some form of public transit connection. Many cases can be improved a lot, but it isn't even close to being comparable to the thoroughly unsustainable very low density American sprawl.

homo_nullius 5y ago

The bigger problem with EV revolution is carbon footprint of its side effects, e.g., extra emissions from producing and utilizing batteries, or extra particulates from tire wear due to weight of electric vehicles.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
Please explain why a Tesla Model 3 is negligibly heavier than a BMW 3 series.
- homo_nullius 5y ago
  Explain why it's heavier? Because electric vehicles carry all the chemistry, while gasoline powered vehicles only carry carbon and hydrogen and take oxygen from the air. Or explain why the difference in weight is negligible? But it's not, electric vehicles are noticeably heavier, and vehicle weight is the primary driver of tire wear and road wear.

dheera 5y ago

> EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle. Bad urban planning in the US is arguably a bigger problem. Most people aren't rich enough to live within walkable distance of their nearest coffee shop, grocery store, and train station. Trains make you wait an hour outside in the cold wet rain without bathrooms while a mentally ill person harrasses you for half of the hour. Buses don't show up. Curb ramps don't have drainage, so you have wet socks. And the nearest actual bathroom is for "customers only" (at least for males). So people drive. It's unfortunate.

coffeefirst 5y ago
Right. Oddly this is where our climate problems can meet our affordable housing problems: start building clusters of neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable and bikeable. These are in stupidly high demand, we just need more of them. Default to installing heat pumps, solar panels, and EV hookups. There's no silver bullets, but if the average person winds up driving X% fewer miles because they have the option to walk, that's a meaningful win.

dagmx 5y ago

I think it needs to be solved in multiple ways. Reduce the need for cars which will reduce the load on the grid if they're driven less. But move people to buy EV cars instead of ICE where they can't do away with having a car. Even if that still uses dirty energy sources, it's still cleaner than having ICE cars driving everywhere with their little inefficient engines, when a big power plant can do much more to be efficient. It also decouples energy sources in such a way that green energy can be built up to replace it without consumer disruption. It's a win win to move people to EVs, but it's not the only end goal for better climate policy

xapata 5y ago

Progress is better than design paralysis.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

If HN had a vote option that represented "I mostly agree with what you've written, but worry you're only saying it as half-garbled talking point designed to oppose something else that I support" it would get a lot of use from me. I applaud your support of walkable cities with robust public transportation infrastructure. I'm sad that it seems to mostly just be an echo of a decades long misinformation campaign against EVs rather than a positive and sincere suggestion to improve society. The phrase "if we were rational and serious" is a red flag. Rarely has that come up in climate change discussions without a whole bunch of (ironically) irrational assumptions attached to it. Oh if only those silly greens had been more rational! What amazing progress we could have made on this problem. Are we all supposed to pretend that lots of serious (acting) figures on the, let's say, non-green side didn't openly and blatantly lie about it not being a problem and all the solutions being cons long after everyone knew this was what they were doing? If I was to come up with a list of things that were not rational or serious "pretend climate change is not happening" would come way before "let's stop using internal combustion engines in crowded cities because we have cheaper, better, quieter, healthier alternatives readily available".

mkoubaa 5y ago

People want to drive one mile for coffee and there is nothing you or any government can do about it. It's th unfortunate truth

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

The problem is made harder by the fact dense populations of humans sucks. It increases aggressive, conflict and indifference to other people. Crime is always higher. Dealing with infectous disease is harder. You'd never convince me to live in a city. Especially while rearing a child. The coffee shop will always be a mile if not 5 or 10 from me.