5 ms·
People are also notoriously bad at managing their money. If you have the money and suck at using it, EVs and solar panels make a lot more sense, and you should
by lvass 4y ago
People are also notoriously bad at managing their money. If you have the money and suck at using it, EVs and solar panels make a lot more sense, and you should actually do it, we really need to scale up those industries.
- seibelj 4y agoIsn’t the amount of mining waste extremely energy intensive to produce a single EV battery?
- reidjs 4y agoThat’s mainly a talking point used by oil and gas lobbyists to keep their industry from getting crushed by alternative fuels and EVs
- seibelj 4y agoI really don’t think they are worried considering coal usage is at an all-time high and the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand.
- danans 4y ago> the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand. A big advantage of EVs is that presidents of the future shouldn't need to beg for oil as much, as road transportation energy supply market would be largely domestic. But we clearly aren't there yet.
- mxschumacher 4y agoI feel like a broken record at this point, but even if a large part of passenger cars move to electric, industrialized countries still consume incredible amounts of fuel for: all planes, ships, trucks, freight trains, plastics, most fertilizers, heating, electricity production, road building etc
- danans 4y agoThere are emerging/existing solutions for many of these use cases > planes Sustainable aviation fuel, synfuels > trucks, Hydrogen fuel cells freight trains, Batteries, renewable diesel, synfuels > heating, Heat pumps > electricity production Outside of some remote islands petroleum is hardly used for electricity production.
- reidjs 4y agoOk? What does that have to do with EVs? Those are all different problems to solve. You can’t say we shouldn’t partially focus on fixing a problem because it doesn’t fix every single problem we have.
- mxschumacher 4y agoEVs lower dependence on oil, but we'll have to keep begging Saudi Arabia and many similar countries, which was the mistaken assumption of the comment I am responding to
- nasmorn 4y agoTrains are electric in Europe for 50 years now.
- mxschumacher 4y agoFreight rail, not passenger
- mxschumacher 4y agoStill incredible to consider how much material we'll have to dig out of the ground to deliver hundreds of GW of renewable electricity production potential in the form of solar and wind. For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity. Maybe widespread deployment of hydrogen can help
- Retric 4y ago> For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity. That’s widely incorrect. How exactly much batteries we need, what their chemistry should be is up for some debate as are exact numbers for commercially viable raw materials etc. But using the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... and using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet. Clearly we are never going to actually mine that much lithium, but just as clearly we don’t need anything like that much eitehr.
- ehvatum 4y ago> using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet. Strip mine the entire planet to a depth of multiple miles, and the resulting batteries are still few enough to talk about in human terms. This is not good.
- danans 4y agoNot compared to the lifetime energy intensity of driving a gasoline powered car.
- bergenty 4y agoNot even close to even 5 years of fossil fuel usage in a car.