8 ms·

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-eff

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
      - cassandratt 5y ago
        We understand. What are we supposed to do, sell our houses and move to a condo downtown? Whose going to buy them, and where the fuck are we going to get the resources to house that many people without a massive energy/resource exploitation. So "no cars" is childish and naive. Awareness isn't the issue, but awareness of an issue we have no control over does nothing of value to anyone other than add anxiety.
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.

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
    - cassandratt 5y ago
      We understand. What are we supposed to do, sell our houses and move to a condo downtown? Whose going to buy them, and where the fuck are we going to get the resources to house that many people without a massive energy/resource exploitation. So "no cars" is childish and naive. Awareness isn't the issue, but awareness of an issue we have no control over does nothing of value to anyone other than add anxiety.

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.