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People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emi

People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin. End of story. Planting trees does not 'offset' fossil emissions unless you plan to take the tree and bury it in an anoxic environment in which it can never decay. Solar panels and wind turbines offset nothing at all. The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel production globally.

lm28469 5y ago
> People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs, they're not looking for a long term solution to the environmental problem, they're looking for a short term solution to extend their market for one more generation.
- unholiness 5y ago
  Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE cars) Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.
    - cassandratt 5y ago
      This isn't very well thought out, where do you live?
      - lm28469 5y ago
        We spread too much thanks to unsustainable technologies/ideologies and now that we're facing the consequences our excuse is "how will we continue living unsustainably" Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of water: you don't
        cassandratt 5y ago
        This is even worse thought out, and really demonstrates a real lack of understanding of how the world works. Oh how humans work. You're one of us, and equally complicit as any human live today. So, maybe, rather than being this unearned smugness, you come up with an answer. Any idiot can identify the challenges, and shit on something. Las Vegas exists, as do many other desert cities. So, this point makes no sense. Humans, harness the physics of the world around us, to shape our futures. The problem isn't cars, it's capitalism.
      - cowmoo728 5y ago
        From many people's viewpoints, it is not very well thought out to subsidize the use of 3-ton single occupancy vehicles that require massive amounts of energy to manufacture and massive amounts of energy to move. At the very least there should be far higher licensing taxes, congestion charges, road wear taxes, enormous gas taxes, etc.
        generalenvelope 5y ago
        I think people don't realize just how bad car dependence is for their own communities. notjustbikes has many good videos on the topic, such as: Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far > Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future? Hm yes, a sustainable future won't be made of 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person. There are 1.5B personal vehicles on earth right now, replacing every single one of them with the EV equivalent will just displace the problem (EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street, then you have to take care about recycling, mining the raw materials, &c.) This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
    - unholiness 5y ago
      I'm still missing a vision for a positive future which lacks EVs. Every vision of a low-carbon future requires many things to change. You're saying we should let the current slow movement on electricty generation be an excuse for not moving on EVs (despite the fact that they're an improvement regardless). You could similarly argue that the slow movement on EVs should be an excuse from not improving electricity generation (despite the fact that there are improvements regardless). Whataboutism about one vision is worthless until you have a better vision, where we can compare the practical and political tradeoffs between them.
      - lm28469 5y ago
        Simple: no more personal cars But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model
        goatlover 5y ago
        How is that going to work out politically? You think a majority of voters are gong to support banning all personal automobiles? In the US, banning personal firearms is non-starter, and car ownership is even more deeply embedded.
  - dbingham 5y ago
    EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the steel production process, and at the end of the day we can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall resource consumption substantially. I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis. And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE. For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000 places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US). +1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.
      - dbingham 5y ago
        Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban planning model to change (and that changing it is going to require massive investments) so in the mean time we need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we need to do that alongside education about the urban planning model and the need to eventually get off cars entirely. We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society. What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    > long-term benefits of EVs If a benefit of EVs is currently theoretical and would only come after the useful life of the car, is it really a benefit? I say this as a happy EV-owner, but one who doubts that my EV will still be on the road by the time when my electricity is >75% sourced from renewable or nuclear energy.
    - comex 5y ago
      If nothing else, at least the demand from your EV is contributing to the mammoth project of EV charging infrastructure, which will help with future EV uptake.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      The current projections are that the switchover to primary renewables is going to happen in the lifetime of EVs manufactured today. For a slow to adapt industry such as our energy grids the drastic capital cost reductions (much less TCO advantages such as decreased fuel costs, decreased maintenance costs) of renewables (especially wind and solar, but some of those advances have had knock-on effects in mainstay hydro's TCO too) has made them take notice and they are adjusting much more rapidly than people assume. Entire countries have had 24 hour periods or more entirely running on renewables, and sure that's good weather, but that's still not something some people would have guessed ten years ago. Most of that isn't top-down government mandates, most of that is "ordinary" capitalism and the fact that power companies are realizing it's "easy money" to go for cheaper renewables as large portions of their energy mix. (To be fair, power companies have always worked that way. Even what most people think of as "coal states" have always been nearly as much hydro as coal since basically the beginning of electricity.) Just about no one is building new nuclear into the mix right now, but that's a different can of worms, and at least for the moment with so many easy wins in sight to be had in solar/wind/improving existing hydro it may not even be necessary to add much or any nuclear.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        > lifetime of EVs manufactured today My EV is 7.5 years old and so probably halfway to its median practical service life. It's already down to around 70 miles of "can count on it" range and in 7.5 more years, I expect it to be down to just under 60. I don't think very many 2015 Nissan LEAFs will be in service at the epoch rollover, unless someone comes out with a <$2500 in today's money battery replacement pack. No one's putting a $5-7K battery into a 15 year-old outdated tech BEV in 2030.
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus, etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the associated traffic. We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly Sure. That doesn’t make EVs a “short term solution”. This is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era greens to oppose nuclear power. It’s not nukes or windmills, it’s nukes or coal.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        No. It really is nukes or wind turbines. Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't. Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could. This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.
        JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Nobody is building coal plants Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines. Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-shuns-gas-in-new-energy-plan-as-coal-makes-a-comeback https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    It would be far better to generate synthetic gasoline from atmospheric carbon, if such a thing were possible. Then you don't need to replace all the cars or all the fuel (energy) delivery infrastructure.
    - chii 5y ago
      I think synthetic fuels works better in large transport vehicles, like planes and cargo ships. These require hi-density fuels, and electrification of these do not work. for personal vehicles, i think EV works well, as electricity generation is far more efficient than synthetic fuel generation, and battery at this weight scale and distance works great. So you'd have a middle use-case - trucks and lorries - which i'm unsure if electrification works for. Presumably, it would, but only if charging stations are dotted around a lot more places, including remote areas.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  I don't see the connection to EVs. Certainly one can power EVs using coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, which just shifts the demand away from oil and towards coal and gas. However, people can also power their EVs off wind, solar or uranium power, whose production involves no fossil fuels. In contrast, ICE vehicles are locked into gasoline or diesel. Obviously, transition to EV is a key necessity for getting transportation off fossil fuels. Now, international jet travel and global shipping are not going to work with electric power due to lower energy density in batteries, but here we can simply do artificial photosynthesis, based on DAC and hydrogen from water, and generate carbon-neutral fuel with no need to sacrifice agricultural land.
  - snewman 5y ago
    I agree with most of this, but we keep finding clever ways to knock down sectors that had seemed impossible to electrify. For instance, FleetZero claims to have a practical approach for global shipping [1]. It's not yet proven, but I haven't seen a serious counter-argument. Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes, and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say. [1] https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil
  - cheschire 5y ago
    Perhaps GP had an issue with the battery technology itself. Obvious comments about rare or toxic mining aside, population center infrastructure isn't really designed to support everyone having battery based EVs.
    - photochemsyn 5y ago
      It's true that personal EVs are not that great in dense urban centers due to the congestion problem. Light electric rail, electric buses and bicycles are the better option.
      - cheschire 5y ago
- jhgb 5y ago
  But mass adoption of EVs, percentage wise, is absolutely required. I don't see how the alternative of keeping ICE vehicles is sustainable.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Neither thermic nor electric vehicles are sustainable with our current usage. Let's pretend you don't know about cars and someone comes to pitch you this idea: "We'll make a 3 tonnes metal box, with a 1 tonne battery, that will on average only transport about 80kg of human being from A to B, we'll need about 1B of them". Who on earth would believe this is the optimal solution to a green future ?
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      You do realize that people aren't trying to make heavy vehicles, but that weight is imposed by physical and economic constraints. EV manufacturers try very hard to minimize weight. But anyway, it makes no sense to criticize EVs in a vacuum--tell us all about your miracle solution! Are we going to treat every urban community like a dense metropolis? Or are we going to close down urban communities and force everyone into fewer concrete jungles? And how much do you reckon your solution will cost?
      - fluctor 5y ago
        Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example). Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.
        5y ago
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I don't think anyone is pushing mass adoption of EVs as the whole solution to the climate problem, but it largely solves for the "consumer transit" share of the climate problem. Of course, if you're hinting at doing away with cars, then yeah, people are fixating on EVs because getting rid of cars is completely infeasible, politically, economically, and environmentally (it would be a decades-long project that would involve tremendous emissions to address a small part of a problem that we have only a few decades to solve in total).
  - lm28469 5y ago
    > it would be a decades-long project Too bad nobody makes decade long projects for their country/continent/planet anymore. Instead we're stuck in ~5 years cycles of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      You misunderstand the problem. It's not an issue that the project is decades long, it's that it is going to take, say 50 years of capital- and carbon-intensive development to solve a small part of a larger problem that we only have, say, 50 years to solve. And it offers virtually nothing over EVs except to gratify some anti-car ideologues. NOTE: if it's not evident, those 50 year figures are made up. The point is that we have limited time and resources to solve the whole climate problem and we should be efficient (rather than ideological) in our approach.
em500 5y ago
But in reality, when prices at the pump rise >20%, even so called progressive governments resort to excise tax cuts and drill baby drill. Because if they didn't they'll be out of office very quickly.
datadata 5y ago
A single tree is likely to release its carbon at the end of its life. A forest however can permanently endure and keep retain carbon in aggregate, at least compared to the alternative barren ground. To your point though, I would be surprised if this effect is big enough relative to removing fossil fuels from the energy mix.
- Misdicorl 5y ago
  I believe you can safely assume "it is not enough". We are recirculating literally millions of years worth of trees into the air. No amount of living carbon will be able to offset it, even if the entire earth were covered in trees (citation needed).
  - datadata 5y ago
    Citations seem to indicate this is actually enough! This surprised me also: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon. Indicates 400GT are in from forests, vs 800GT in the atmosphere. Some various sources seem to indicate that around 50% of forests have been destroyed by humans already (by area, not necessarily by carbon?). So if we could instantly recover all forests, and nothing else changed, that alone would reduce the atmosphere CO2 to preindustrial levels (it has almost doubled). I think the misleading part about "millions of years worth of trees" is that a very small percentage of tree biomass probably becomes useful fossil fuel, and the majority is recycled many times.
    - Misdicorl 5y ago
      Wow, that really is surprising to me. This is the best non-personal news I've heard in probably a decade, so thanks for sharing!
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  A forest however can permanently endure... Here in California we had two million acre burn last year, including, I believe, some "carbon sequestering" forests. A lot of forest in the US actually have an excessive amount of growth due to suppression policies. You can't expect to "plant" a forest in some random location and expect it to simply endure. Ecosystems have a more or less natural level of vegetation and getting more to grow is asking for it to burn away later (accelerating global warming, later). And that's not talking about the greater propensity for fire due to global warming itself.
dhc02 5y ago
An interesting compromise would be that carbon "offsets" are available for purchase, but must be used to fund installation of renewable generation and energy storage infrastructure. So that carbon offsets are accelerating the transition away from carbon.
okamiueru 5y ago
Isn't the carbon that make up trees a form of sequestration? I thought that was the "global warming counter measure" component of planting trees. But, perhaps this part of the equation can never be significant?
- yojo 5y ago
  The problem is at some point the tree dies, decays, and releases the carbon it was holding. Contrast to an oil deposit which, left undisturbed, might never release its carbon.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    Thinking of it at the individual tree level is wrong. An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon.
    - yojo 5y ago
      I’m not an expert on the market, but I don’t think there are many carbon offsets sold as “we will plant and maintain an acre of forest in perpetuity.” And frankly it’s not something any organization can promise. Governments change and clear forest that was previously protected. Brazil provides a current and unfortunate example of this.
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        Also I wonder what ratio of those schemes are trees planted that would have anyway been planted for industrial forestry... We grow trees for reasons. And if there is extra cash in it there is few who don't take it.
    - rsync 5y ago
      "An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon." But it's even more complicated than that ... We are reforesting ~20 acres of woodland just outside of San Francisco and we are not, as you say, thinking about individual trees - we are thinking of the woods as a whole ... ... which means clearing out a tremendous amount of sapling / deadwood / litter material that would quickly combust in a wildfire and destroy the entire forest. So while we are on track for planting >200 redwood and douglas fir trees, we have also had to cut down >100 marginal trees to reduce fuel load. We're thinking on the scale of the entire forest and the entire forest needs to survive a burn ... including our relatively new trees that aren't as fire resistant as the old growth redwoods that were originally logged out of here. Generally speaking: The complexity of carbon mathematics is fraught and complex and I don't think it's reasonable to expect end users like consumers to navigate it.
lalalandland 5y ago
Maybe we can grow crustaceans in massive numbers in the ocean? There have during earths history been huge deposits of carbon from such animals
- GordonS 5y ago
  Changing an ecosystem is always a risky thing to do though, because there are long food chains, different species living in symbiosis, and just so very many variables.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    We will have to get good at it then— we are already doing, just not trying to do it well. Engineering can function even in complex environments.
- chii 5y ago
  If growing in the ocean is to be done, it's probably better to try increase the amount of food algae/plankton at the bottom of the chain. Last i heard, there was some experiment in this area, where a "sterile" part of the ocean was studied, and found that iron is the limiting micro-nutrient. By spreading iron (or rust i guess?) in these dead areas of the ocean, it would trigger growth, which would create a lot more ocean life where none existed before. But the long term consequences of doing this is unknown. And that's not to mention how to actually get the requisite amount of iron to those places.
deleted 5y ago
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renewiltord 5y ago
This is a time based problem. Even if we make a forest, and cut it down 30 years from now, we have won ourselves 30 years of sequestration. In those 30 years we can develop substitution tech.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin Why would avoiding the same amount of emissions in a place where it's cheaper to avoid not help? Let's say for each kg of kerosene you burn in your plane, you hand out a solar lamp to someone using kerosene lamps, accelerating solar lamp adoption in a way that causes 1 kg less kerosene to be burned by that person. The total emissions without the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a lamp (over the period we're looking at). The total emissions with the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a plane (and 0 in the lamp). That seems very much offsetting.

lm28469 5y ago

> People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs, they're not looking for a long term solution to the environmental problem, they're looking for a short term solution to extend their market for one more generation.

unholiness 5y ago
Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE cars) Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.
  - cassandratt 5y ago
    This isn't very well thought out, where do you live?
    - lm28469 5y ago
      We spread too much thanks to unsustainable technologies/ideologies and now that we're facing the consequences our excuse is "how will we continue living unsustainably" Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of water: you don't
      - cassandratt 5y ago
        This is even worse thought out, and really demonstrates a real lack of understanding of how the world works. Oh how humans work. You're one of us, and equally complicit as any human live today. So, maybe, rather than being this unearned smugness, you come up with an answer. Any idiot can identify the challenges, and shit on something. Las Vegas exists, as do many other desert cities. So, this point makes no sense. Humans, harness the physics of the world around us, to shape our futures. The problem isn't cars, it's capitalism.
    - cowmoo728 5y ago
      From many people's viewpoints, it is not very well thought out to subsidize the use of 3-ton single occupancy vehicles that require massive amounts of energy to manufacture and massive amounts of energy to move. At the very least there should be far higher licensing taxes, congestion charges, road wear taxes, enormous gas taxes, etc.
      - generalenvelope 5y ago
        I think people don't realize just how bad car dependence is for their own communities. notjustbikes has many good videos on the topic, such as: Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0 The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
- lm28469 5y ago
  Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far > Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future? Hm yes, a sustainable future won't be made of 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person. There are 1.5B personal vehicles on earth right now, replacing every single one of them with the EV equivalent will just displace the problem (EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street, then you have to take care about recycling, mining the raw materials, &c.) This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
  - unholiness 5y ago
    I'm still missing a vision for a positive future which lacks EVs. Every vision of a low-carbon future requires many things to change. You're saying we should let the current slow movement on electricty generation be an excuse for not moving on EVs (despite the fact that they're an improvement regardless). You could similarly argue that the slow movement on EVs should be an excuse from not improving electricity generation (despite the fact that there are improvements regardless). Whataboutism about one vision is worthless until you have a better vision, where we can compare the practical and political tradeoffs between them.
    - lm28469 5y ago
      Simple: no more personal cars But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model
      - goatlover 5y ago
        How is that going to work out politically? You think a majority of voters are gong to support banning all personal automobiles? In the US, banning personal firearms is non-starter, and car ownership is even more deeply embedded.
- dbingham 5y ago
  EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the steel production process, and at the end of the day we can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall resource consumption substantially. I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis. And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE. For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000 places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US). +1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.
    - dbingham 5y ago
      Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban planning model to change (and that changing it is going to require massive investments) so in the mean time we need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we need to do that alongside education about the urban planning model and the need to eventually get off cars entirely. We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society. What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."
- sokoloff 5y ago
  > long-term benefits of EVs If a benefit of EVs is currently theoretical and would only come after the useful life of the car, is it really a benefit? I say this as a happy EV-owner, but one who doubts that my EV will still be on the road by the time when my electricity is >75% sourced from renewable or nuclear energy.
  - comex 5y ago
    If nothing else, at least the demand from your EV is contributing to the mammoth project of EV charging infrastructure, which will help with future EV uptake.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    The current projections are that the switchover to primary renewables is going to happen in the lifetime of EVs manufactured today. For a slow to adapt industry such as our energy grids the drastic capital cost reductions (much less TCO advantages such as decreased fuel costs, decreased maintenance costs) of renewables (especially wind and solar, but some of those advances have had knock-on effects in mainstay hydro's TCO too) has made them take notice and they are adjusting much more rapidly than people assume. Entire countries have had 24 hour periods or more entirely running on renewables, and sure that's good weather, but that's still not something some people would have guessed ten years ago. Most of that isn't top-down government mandates, most of that is "ordinary" capitalism and the fact that power companies are realizing it's "easy money" to go for cheaper renewables as large portions of their energy mix. (To be fair, power companies have always worked that way. Even what most people think of as "coal states" have always been nearly as much hydro as coal since basically the beginning of electricity.) Just about no one is building new nuclear into the mix right now, but that's a different can of worms, and at least for the moment with so many easy wins in sight to be had in solar/wind/improving existing hydro it may not even be necessary to add much or any nuclear.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      > lifetime of EVs manufactured today My EV is 7.5 years old and so probably halfway to its median practical service life. It's already down to around 70 miles of "can count on it" range and in 7.5 more years, I expect it to be down to just under 60. I don't think very many 2015 Nissan LEAFs will be in service at the epoch rollover, unless someone comes out with a <$2500 in today's money battery replacement pack. No one's putting a $5-7K battery into a 15 year-old outdated tech BEV in 2030.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus, etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the associated traffic. We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly Sure. That doesn’t make EVs a “short term solution”. This is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era greens to oppose nuclear power. It’s not nukes or windmills, it’s nukes or coal.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      No. It really is nukes or wind turbines. Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't. Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could. This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Nobody is building coal plants Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines. Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-shuns-gas-in-new-energy-plan-as-coal-makes-a-comeback https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  It would be far better to generate synthetic gasoline from atmospheric carbon, if such a thing were possible. Then you don't need to replace all the cars or all the fuel (energy) delivery infrastructure.
  - chii 5y ago
    I think synthetic fuels works better in large transport vehicles, like planes and cargo ships. These require hi-density fuels, and electrification of these do not work. for personal vehicles, i think EV works well, as electricity generation is far more efficient than synthetic fuel generation, and battery at this weight scale and distance works great. So you'd have a middle use-case - trucks and lorries - which i'm unsure if electrification works for. Presumably, it would, but only if charging stations are dotted around a lot more places, including remote areas.
photochemsyn 5y ago
I don't see the connection to EVs. Certainly one can power EVs using coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, which just shifts the demand away from oil and towards coal and gas. However, people can also power their EVs off wind, solar or uranium power, whose production involves no fossil fuels. In contrast, ICE vehicles are locked into gasoline or diesel. Obviously, transition to EV is a key necessity for getting transportation off fossil fuels. Now, international jet travel and global shipping are not going to work with electric power due to lower energy density in batteries, but here we can simply do artificial photosynthesis, based on DAC and hydrogen from water, and generate carbon-neutral fuel with no need to sacrifice agricultural land.
- snewman 5y ago
  I agree with most of this, but we keep finding clever ways to knock down sectors that had seemed impossible to electrify. For instance, FleetZero claims to have a practical approach for global shipping [1]. It's not yet proven, but I haven't seen a serious counter-argument. Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes, and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say. [1] https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil
- cheschire 5y ago
  Perhaps GP had an issue with the battery technology itself. Obvious comments about rare or toxic mining aside, population center infrastructure isn't really designed to support everyone having battery based EVs.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    It's true that personal EVs are not that great in dense urban centers due to the congestion problem. Light electric rail, electric buses and bicycles are the better option.
    - cheschire 5y ago
jhgb 5y ago
But mass adoption of EVs, percentage wise, is absolutely required. I don't see how the alternative of keeping ICE vehicles is sustainable.
- lm28469 5y ago
  Neither thermic nor electric vehicles are sustainable with our current usage. Let's pretend you don't know about cars and someone comes to pitch you this idea: "We'll make a 3 tonnes metal box, with a 1 tonne battery, that will on average only transport about 80kg of human being from A to B, we'll need about 1B of them". Who on earth would believe this is the optimal solution to a green future ?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    You do realize that people aren't trying to make heavy vehicles, but that weight is imposed by physical and economic constraints. EV manufacturers try very hard to minimize weight. But anyway, it makes no sense to criticize EVs in a vacuum--tell us all about your miracle solution! Are we going to treat every urban community like a dense metropolis? Or are we going to close down urban communities and force everyone into fewer concrete jungles? And how much do you reckon your solution will cost?
    - fluctor 5y ago
      Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example). Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.
      - 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
I don't think anyone is pushing mass adoption of EVs as the whole solution to the climate problem, but it largely solves for the "consumer transit" share of the climate problem. Of course, if you're hinting at doing away with cars, then yeah, people are fixating on EVs because getting rid of cars is completely infeasible, politically, economically, and environmentally (it would be a decades-long project that would involve tremendous emissions to address a small part of a problem that we have only a few decades to solve in total).
- lm28469 5y ago
  > it would be a decades-long project Too bad nobody makes decade long projects for their country/continent/planet anymore. Instead we're stuck in ~5 years cycles of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    You misunderstand the problem. It's not an issue that the project is decades long, it's that it is going to take, say 50 years of capital- and carbon-intensive development to solve a small part of a larger problem that we only have, say, 50 years to solve. And it offers virtually nothing over EVs except to gratify some anti-car ideologues. NOTE: if it's not evident, those 50 year figures are made up. The point is that we have limited time and resources to solve the whole climate problem and we should be efficient (rather than ideological) in our approach.

em500 5y ago

But in reality, when prices at the pump rise >20%, even so called progressive governments resort to excise tax cuts and drill baby drill. Because if they didn't they'll be out of office very quickly.

datadata 5y ago

A single tree is likely to release its carbon at the end of its life. A forest however can permanently endure and keep retain carbon in aggregate, at least compared to the alternative barren ground. To your point though, I would be surprised if this effect is big enough relative to removing fossil fuels from the energy mix.

Misdicorl 5y ago
I believe you can safely assume "it is not enough". We are recirculating literally millions of years worth of trees into the air. No amount of living carbon will be able to offset it, even if the entire earth were covered in trees (citation needed).
- datadata 5y ago
  Citations seem to indicate this is actually enough! This surprised me also: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon. Indicates 400GT are in from forests, vs 800GT in the atmosphere. Some various sources seem to indicate that around 50% of forests have been destroyed by humans already (by area, not necessarily by carbon?). So if we could instantly recover all forests, and nothing else changed, that alone would reduce the atmosphere CO2 to preindustrial levels (it has almost doubled). I think the misleading part about "millions of years worth of trees" is that a very small percentage of tree biomass probably becomes useful fossil fuel, and the majority is recycled many times.
  - Misdicorl 5y ago
    Wow, that really is surprising to me. This is the best non-personal news I've heard in probably a decade, so thanks for sharing!
joe_the_user 5y ago
A forest however can permanently endure... Here in California we had two million acre burn last year, including, I believe, some "carbon sequestering" forests. A lot of forest in the US actually have an excessive amount of growth due to suppression policies. You can't expect to "plant" a forest in some random location and expect it to simply endure. Ecosystems have a more or less natural level of vegetation and getting more to grow is asking for it to burn away later (accelerating global warming, later). And that's not talking about the greater propensity for fire due to global warming itself.

dhc02 5y ago

An interesting compromise would be that carbon "offsets" are available for purchase, but must be used to fund installation of renewable generation and energy storage infrastructure. So that carbon offsets are accelerating the transition away from carbon.

okamiueru 5y ago

Isn't the carbon that make up trees a form of sequestration? I thought that was the "global warming counter measure" component of planting trees. But, perhaps this part of the equation can never be significant?

yojo 5y ago
The problem is at some point the tree dies, decays, and releases the carbon it was holding. Contrast to an oil deposit which, left undisturbed, might never release its carbon.
- SamBam 5y ago
  Thinking of it at the individual tree level is wrong. An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon.
  - yojo 5y ago
    I’m not an expert on the market, but I don’t think there are many carbon offsets sold as “we will plant and maintain an acre of forest in perpetuity.” And frankly it’s not something any organization can promise. Governments change and clear forest that was previously protected. Brazil provides a current and unfortunate example of this.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Also I wonder what ratio of those schemes are trees planted that would have anyway been planted for industrial forestry... We grow trees for reasons. And if there is extra cash in it there is few who don't take it.
  - rsync 5y ago
    "An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon." But it's even more complicated than that ... We are reforesting ~20 acres of woodland just outside of San Francisco and we are not, as you say, thinking about individual trees - we are thinking of the woods as a whole ... ... which means clearing out a tremendous amount of sapling / deadwood / litter material that would quickly combust in a wildfire and destroy the entire forest. So while we are on track for planting >200 redwood and douglas fir trees, we have also had to cut down >100 marginal trees to reduce fuel load. We're thinking on the scale of the entire forest and the entire forest needs to survive a burn ... including our relatively new trees that aren't as fire resistant as the old growth redwoods that were originally logged out of here. Generally speaking: The complexity of carbon mathematics is fraught and complex and I don't think it's reasonable to expect end users like consumers to navigate it.

lalalandland 5y ago

Maybe we can grow crustaceans in massive numbers in the ocean? There have during earths history been huge deposits of carbon from such animals

GordonS 5y ago
Changing an ecosystem is always a risky thing to do though, because there are long food chains, different species living in symbiosis, and just so very many variables.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  We will have to get good at it then— we are already doing, just not trying to do it well. Engineering can function even in complex environments.
chii 5y ago
If growing in the ocean is to be done, it's probably better to try increase the amount of food algae/plankton at the bottom of the chain. Last i heard, there was some experiment in this area, where a "sterile" part of the ocean was studied, and found that iron is the limiting micro-nutrient. By spreading iron (or rust i guess?) in these dead areas of the ocean, it would trigger growth, which would create a lot more ocean life where none existed before. But the long term consequences of doing this is unknown. And that's not to mention how to actually get the requisite amount of iron to those places.

deleted 5y ago

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renewiltord 5y ago

This is a time based problem. Even if we make a forest, and cut it down 30 years from now, we have won ourselves 30 years of sequestration. In those 30 years we can develop substitution tech.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin Why would avoiding the same amount of emissions in a place where it's cheaper to avoid not help? Let's say for each kg of kerosene you burn in your plane, you hand out a solar lamp to someone using kerosene lamps, accelerating solar lamp adoption in a way that causes 1 kg less kerosene to be burned by that person. The total emissions without the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a lamp (over the period we're looking at). The total emissions with the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a plane (and 0 in the lamp). That seems very much offsetting.