7 ms·

This is the inevitable outcome of continuing to uphold the status quo of the car-dominant society: shortages in gasoline, lithium, cobalt, copper, urban land, e

by nayuki 4y ago

This is the inevitable outcome of continuing to uphold the status quo of the car-dominant society: shortages in gasoline, lithium, cobalt, copper, urban land, etc. We have to face the music: Converting gas cars to electric will only fix a small fraction of all the problems caused by cars. Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution.

konschubert 4y ago
We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. I am very much against cars in cities, just like you, but this is an independent topic. If you try to fight climate change by banning cars you will run out of time and lose both fights.
- nayuki 4y ago
  What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context. Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good. While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change. > Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda. What's with this accusation?
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions. Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities. As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)
    - spookie 4y ago
      Spot on. I really hope that through automation, rural public transportation becomes cheaper and more frequent as a result. I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons. Who had cars though? No problem. But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.
    - ATsch 4y ago
      > Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung. I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight). Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.
      - 4y ago
- Scarblac 4y ago
  Climate change is one crisis, but there will also be a crisis in availability of many resources (like copper).
- coldtea 4y ago
  >We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. How about less cars, less power use, and return to 1980s or 60s standards of technology?
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    If it means my grandchildren would be significantly less likely to die in water or oil wars then I'd take that trade today.
  - schroeding 4y ago
    With "returning to 60s or 80s standards of technology", do you mean repairability and great build quality? That would a great step towards a circular / no-waste economy :)
    - nomel 4y ago
      > repairability and great build quality Maybe build quality of the assembly, but definitely not the build quality of anything mechanical! Modern cars have ludicrously better reliability than anything from the 60's to 80's. A car not making it to 100k miles is a rare exception these days, even with somewhat abusive upkeep.
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        Every car I have ever owned (9 so far since 1975) went far beyond 100k miles, even my 1965 Mini van that I bought in 1975 for 65 GBP. But I agree that the newer cars were much more reliable.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Among other things, yes. And no IoT crap, for one.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    How about less cars, more efficient use of energy, cleaner power production, moving towards better standards of technology? We don’t need to regress to solve the climate emergency. That’s attacking the problem from the wrong side and alienating people.
- specialist 4y ago
  ...AND land use reforms.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. The problem is that some of these are working against each other. Electric cars means much much higher electrical energy needs - perhaps needing to even double the current grid. And that works against the need to decomission fossil fuel plants. As such, significantly reducing car usage seems like a much safer bet than achieving a 0-carbon grid that is double the size of the current one in ~15 years.
  - nradov 4y ago
    How would you propose to significantly reduce car usage in 15 years? I've never seen a realistic plan for that which accounts for politics, funding, and the time required to build large infrastructure projects. Just pointing out that we ought to do it doesn't get us anywhere.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I think you could do a lot with quick-build bus and bike lanes, and some combination of pollution taxes and market-pricing for parking & high-demand roads/bridges. A lot of people will take a bus - it’s so much cheaper & less stressful - but only if service is reliable so I’d focus on how you could remove delays there, and many things like bus priority lanes or enforcement can be implemented quickly at modest cost. The big question is politics: even in cities where many people use transit, the political class favors cars.
      - pandaman 4y ago
        A lot of single programmers in dense metros, living in apartments, conveniently located next to transit and close to work, might do so. Getting groceries for a family, getting kids to schools and after school activities, running errands etc. is very inconvenient on a bus. As for how much cheaper is the bus I am not sure, last time I've taken one it was $1.5 for each leg, of course, this depends on location, though it's pretty stressful with half of the passengers being seemingly troubled and sometimes "experiencing" strong BO, urination, vomiting and drug consumption right on the bus.
hunterb123 4y ago
Push your local officials to redesign your city and actually invest in local transportation, not just funnel it to contractor buddies. I agree there's a problem with cars in cities, but there's not a problem with cars elsewhere. Electrifying cars and trucks helps diversify how they are powered and keeps the logistics industries and tourist industries humming. It also helps public transportation, taxi services, etc. Cars in cities is a local problem, not a federal or even state one. What are those local solutions though? Trains for sure, use Japan as the model. Privatized but government controlled, cheap, clean, safe. Scooters? Those are an eye sore, they are laying everywhere, but are useful. Maybe at least bike racks for them?
tammer 4y ago
This is correct & I’ll add that reorganizing around sustainable ways of being is in fact an inevitably. And a result of this inevitably will be huge winners who invest in sustainable ways of being and huge losers tied to old ways of doing things.
kube-system 4y ago
> Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution. That is simple to say, but what does that actually mean? I think some cities simply wouldn't exist if being navigable without car was a requirement. People will never move around Phoenix like they move around Amsterdam.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Why not? A lot of europea cities went car-centric (building highways through city centres etc) in the 20th century, and a lot of those changes have been rolled back. It won’t happen immediately, but it could easily happen over say 50 years. The barriers are political not technical.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nradov 4y ago
    Weather and terrain. Amsterdam is fortunate in being flat, and in having a fairly moderate climate where it's rarely extremely hot or cold. That situation doesn't obtain in most large North American cities. Sure it's possible to ride a bike up a steep hill in Philadelphia in the middle of an ice storm or across Phoenix in a 40 °C heat wave, but it's simply unrealistic to expect most people to do so. We ought to do more to improve bicycling infrastructure in most cities but that will never fix our fundamental transportation issues.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Weather I’ll give you, but plenty of people ride bikes in hilly cities in Europe. It would still be possible to improve bus services in hot cities.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    There is a very significant difference between a dense city with a highway through the center of it, and a city that never had a dense center to begin with. Many places that people live in the US only exist because of cars. Without cars, they'd cease to exist. There are not many cities in Europe that are predated by the ubiquity of cars.
stevenjgarner 4y ago
The looming copper shortage does not just coming for EV's. ICE vehicles use a substantial amount of copper (and other metals). "Starters, generators, and alternators contain an average of 2.8, 2.6, and 1.5 pounds of copper, respectively. Alternators also contain 3 to 4 pounds of aluminum. Most of the remaining metal is iron. About one-half of the starters have a solenoid that contains 0.5 pounds of copper." [0]. So that's at least 4.3 lbs (1.95 kg) of copper per ICE vehicle, not including uses in electronics etc. [0] https://www.911metallurgist.com/scrapped-starter-motors-alternators-recycling/ https://www.911metallurgist.com/scrapped-starter-motors-alte...
- cmroanirgo 4y ago
  Correct. The article mentions that EV use 2.5 times the amount of copper though. It also mentions how it's more than just what's in the car - that more copper infrastructure is required to power them. Lastly, it also mentions how using aluminium as a substitute just moves the goal posts, bc more bauxite need to be mined and smeltered.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Even in retaining current living standards, environmental action is an uphill battle.
spookie 4y ago
Yeah cities should be redesigned, but let's not forget everyone else...? Most of us are still living in rural areas, whereby public transportation wouldn't really solve much.

by nayuki 4y ago

konschubert 4y ago

We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. I am very much against cars in cities, just like you, but this is an independent topic. If you try to fight climate change by banning cars you will run out of time and lose both fights.

nayuki 4y ago
What you said is factually true, but I think there are bigger problems in context. Most people, having grown up with cars from parents and peers, can't imagine anything other than a car-centric life. The distances are too far, the bus comes once an hour, and biking is too dangerous. So getting an electric car might be the only improvement that they can think of. Especially given the upfront cost of electric cars and their reduced convenience for long road trips, it's easy to feel that they made enough personal sacrifices for the sake of the common good. While electric cars are a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, the real bitter pills are things like ending exclusive single-family detached house zoning, increasing density, allowing mixed residential-retail-office neighborhoods, converting car lanes to bike or transit lanes, building rail lines (which can easily take a decade), offering decent inter-city train service. I fear that electric cars offer an easy "personal responsibility" band-aid that exhausts people's willpower to demand more substantial collective change. > Don't hijack the climate emergency for your political agenda. What's with this accusation?
- hunterb123 4y ago
  Some people have only lived in highly dense areas and can't imagine why you'd need a car in certain cities or regions. Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. But what I think they want are solutions to the parking, traffic, and other issues that stem from city overpopulation and/or planning mismanagement of cities. As an outsider I agree cities need to rework how they handle cars (idling in traffic for an hour to go 10 miles, parking being hell, etc.) but it's a specific problem to cities (some more so than others)
  - spookie 4y ago
    Spot on. I really hope that through automation, rural public transportation becomes cheaper and more frequent as a result. I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons. Who had cars though? No problem. But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.
  - ATsch 4y ago
    > Those seem to be the people who push the car-less idea the most, because it meets their world view, but doesn't work once you step outside the downtown bubble. I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung. I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight). Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.
    - 4y ago
Scarblac 4y ago
Climate change is one crisis, but there will also be a crisis in availability of many resources (like copper).
coldtea 4y ago
>We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. How about less cars, less power use, and return to 1980s or 60s standards of technology?
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  If it means my grandchildren would be significantly less likely to die in water or oil wars then I'd take that trade today.
- schroeding 4y ago
  With "returning to 60s or 80s standards of technology", do you mean repairability and great build quality? That would a great step towards a circular / no-waste economy :)
  - nomel 4y ago
    > repairability and great build quality Maybe build quality of the assembly, but definitely not the build quality of anything mechanical! Modern cars have ludicrously better reliability than anything from the 60's to 80's. A car not making it to 100k miles is a rare exception these days, even with somewhat abusive upkeep.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Every car I have ever owned (9 so far since 1975) went far beyond 100k miles, even my 1965 Mini van that I bought in 1975 for 65 GBP. But I agree that the newer cars were much more reliable.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Among other things, yes. And no IoT crap, for one.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  How about less cars, more efficient use of energy, cleaner power production, moving towards better standards of technology? We don’t need to regress to solve the climate emergency. That’s attacking the problem from the wrong side and alienating people.
specialist 4y ago
...AND land use reforms.
tsimionescu 4y ago
> We need every possible contribution to fight the dooming climate emergency. Bicycles AND electric cars. Renewables AND nuclear AND carbon capture. The problem is that some of these are working against each other. Electric cars means much much higher electrical energy needs - perhaps needing to even double the current grid. And that works against the need to decomission fossil fuel plants. As such, significantly reducing car usage seems like a much safer bet than achieving a 0-carbon grid that is double the size of the current one in ~15 years.
- nradov 4y ago
  How would you propose to significantly reduce car usage in 15 years? I've never seen a realistic plan for that which accounts for politics, funding, and the time required to build large infrastructure projects. Just pointing out that we ought to do it doesn't get us anywhere.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I think you could do a lot with quick-build bus and bike lanes, and some combination of pollution taxes and market-pricing for parking & high-demand roads/bridges. A lot of people will take a bus - it’s so much cheaper & less stressful - but only if service is reliable so I’d focus on how you could remove delays there, and many things like bus priority lanes or enforcement can be implemented quickly at modest cost. The big question is politics: even in cities where many people use transit, the political class favors cars.
    - pandaman 4y ago
      A lot of single programmers in dense metros, living in apartments, conveniently located next to transit and close to work, might do so. Getting groceries for a family, getting kids to schools and after school activities, running errands etc. is very inconvenient on a bus. As for how much cheaper is the bus I am not sure, last time I've taken one it was $1.5 for each leg, of course, this depends on location, though it's pretty stressful with half of the passengers being seemingly troubled and sometimes "experiencing" strong BO, urination, vomiting and drug consumption right on the bus.

hunterb123 4y ago

Push your local officials to redesign your city and actually invest in local transportation, not just funnel it to contractor buddies. I agree there's a problem with cars in cities, but there's not a problem with cars elsewhere. Electrifying cars and trucks helps diversify how they are powered and keeps the logistics industries and tourist industries humming. It also helps public transportation, taxi services, etc. Cars in cities is a local problem, not a federal or even state one. What are those local solutions though? Trains for sure, use Japan as the model. Privatized but government controlled, cheap, clean, safe. Scooters? Those are an eye sore, they are laying everywhere, but are useful. Maybe at least bike racks for them?

tammer 4y ago

This is correct & I’ll add that reorganizing around sustainable ways of being is in fact an inevitably. And a result of this inevitably will be huge winners who invest in sustainable ways of being and huge losers tied to old ways of doing things.

kube-system 4y ago

> Redesigning cities so that most people won't require a car to work and live is the real solution. That is simple to say, but what does that actually mean? I think some cities simply wouldn't exist if being navigable without car was a requirement. People will never move around Phoenix like they move around Amsterdam.

nicoburns 4y ago
Why not? A lot of europea cities went car-centric (building highways through city centres etc) in the 20th century, and a lot of those changes have been rolled back. It won’t happen immediately, but it could easily happen over say 50 years. The barriers are political not technical.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nradov 4y ago
  Weather and terrain. Amsterdam is fortunate in being flat, and in having a fairly moderate climate where it's rarely extremely hot or cold. That situation doesn't obtain in most large North American cities. Sure it's possible to ride a bike up a steep hill in Philadelphia in the middle of an ice storm or across Phoenix in a 40 °C heat wave, but it's simply unrealistic to expect most people to do so. We ought to do more to improve bicycling infrastructure in most cities but that will never fix our fundamental transportation issues.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Weather I’ll give you, but plenty of people ride bikes in hilly cities in Europe. It would still be possible to improve bus services in hot cities.
- kube-system 4y ago
  There is a very significant difference between a dense city with a highway through the center of it, and a city that never had a dense center to begin with. Many places that people live in the US only exist because of cars. Without cars, they'd cease to exist. There are not many cities in Europe that are predated by the ubiquity of cars.

stevenjgarner 4y ago

The looming copper shortage does not just coming for EV's. ICE vehicles use a substantial amount of copper (and other metals). "Starters, generators, and alternators contain an average of 2.8, 2.6, and 1.5 pounds of copper, respectively. Alternators also contain 3 to 4 pounds of aluminum. Most of the remaining metal is iron. About one-half of the starters have a solenoid that contains 0.5 pounds of copper." [0]. So that's at least 4.3 lbs (1.95 kg) of copper per ICE vehicle, not including uses in electronics etc. [0] https://www.911metallurgist.com/scrapped-starter-motors-alternators-recycling/ https://www.911metallurgist.com/scrapped-starter-motors-alte...

cmroanirgo 4y ago
Correct. The article mentions that EV use 2.5 times the amount of copper though. It also mentions how it's more than just what's in the car - that more copper infrastructure is required to power them. Lastly, it also mentions how using aluminium as a substitute just moves the goal posts, bc more bauxite need to be mined and smeltered.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Even in retaining current living standards, environmental action is an uphill battle.

spookie 4y ago

Yeah cities should be redesigned, but let's not forget everyone else...? Most of us are still living in rural areas, whereby public transportation wouldn't really solve much.