4 ms·

More inconvenient facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://www.youtu

More inconvenient facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_wildfire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_OLgC4nV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E_OLgC4nV0 88,000 people in perhaps 50,000 vehicles all taking the ONE road out of town. Some kind companies setup fuel trucks by the roadside to top up tanks. Gas delivery can be scaled up and even made portable in an emergency. Had those 50,000 vehicles all been EVs, tens of thousands of people would have been stuck beside the road hoping the fire picked a different direction.

epistasis 4y ago
It seems like cars are the problem here though? If people want to live in remote areas and pollute a ton, that's just fine as long as they pay to clean up the mess they make for everyone else. Direct carbon capture from the air is about $500/ton right now, which is only about $5/gallon of gas.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  >> If people want to live in remote areas and pollute a ton Well... if you want lumber, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and food, then you too will need people living "in remote areas".
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Seems fine as long as they pay to clean up their mess, which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      The next time I see a farmer I'll pass along that it is "fine" that he continue growing the food people eat. He will appreciate having permission so to do.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        I don't think you understand what I was saying "fine" too. But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.
        osigurdson 4y ago
        It seems that we are redefining things such that the only way to cause "damage" to the world is via carbon emissions (humans are very good at focusing on one metric to the exclusion of all others). Is there any "damage" done in having greater numbers of the world's poor die of starvation since we've reduced agricultural output in our quest to reduce carbon emissions? Perhaps we can dabble in fertilizer reduction after we've exhausted carbon capture from coal fired electricity plants (particularly in China and the US who are the largest emitters and still use a lot of coal) or at least converted those to natural gas. Messing with agriculture, particularly right now with the current geopolitical situation is very stupid.
        anon291 4y ago
        The cost will just be passed to you anyway.
        phinnaeus 4y ago
        > which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.
        elihu 4y ago
        For that to work we'd need both a carbon tax (or something equivalent) and a heavy tariff on goods that are imported from countries without such a tax. As long as both of those things can be enacted at once, I'm in favor.
        NateEag 4y ago
        The point is that the farmer and miner become the saints doing penance on our behalf - we all benefit from the work they do, then insist that they handle all the costs of the negative externalities their work produces. Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable product after doing so. Life is complicated and easy answers are often wrong.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      There are better optimisations for emissions than chasing farmers and miners.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Such as? I'm generally anti-carbon tax because it's the solution to the problem that is obvious, simple, and wrong. But when there are no other solutions, charging for cleanup is the way to go. Farmers and miners pay for their costs. They can continue to do so and pass their costs on. Some farmers, at least in the US, we massively subsidize to a ridiculous extent in a make-work program for massive amounts of soy and corn. But this is an economic choice that is relatively recent in the history of the US, and we can decide at any moment to improve the efficiency of the economy by making externalized costs internal.
        Panzer04 4y ago
        Why is a carbon tax wrong? It seems very similar in principle to your proposal?
        epistasis 4y ago
        I think a tax on certain sectors can work fine. Especially those sectors with no other options, and that must simply pay to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere that they put into it. However, an economy-wide tax ignores the differing amounts of technological development difficulty, access to capital, and political influence that varies so widely between sectors. So a carbon tax on electricity generation sources works ok to incentivize a switch and internalize the externalities, but it's pretty equivalent to the general ITC/PTC subsidies that have recently been passed, with the exception that they are sector specific. An economy wide carbon tax does almost nothing to incentivize decarbonization of steel or concrete, as the tech isn't there, nobody has spare money to invest in a solution, and the tax wouldn't necessarily increase the price of end products much. They need very specific industrial policy in these sectors to develop alternatives and put them into production. Finally a carbon tax creates an entirely unified political coalition, across many sectors of the economy, to oppose the tax. So setting the tax at a level that is right to incentivize change is guaranteed to be nearly impossible, because od the breadth and political strength of the opposition to it. Specific carrots and sticks for each sector are what can drive real change in each sector. If it was 1980, I'd be supporting a carbon tax. But we need to move far more quickly now to change our economic production systems than a carbon tax could ever conceivably achieve.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  If people want to live in remote areas This is an easily solved problem. Just stop eating. Once you stop eating, then we don't have to have farmers and their remotely-located support communities growing food for you. For bonus points, stop using computers. Electronics are made up of all kinds of metals that are mined in remote locations. So, stop using electricity at all, if you're really concerned about this. And while you're at it, give up toilet paper. It comes from trees that are waaaay out in the forest. If you stop wiping, then we don't have to truck trees to paper mills to make toilet paper for people in the city to use. Do your part.
  - s5300 4y ago
    Lot of strawmans here.
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      The OP suggesting rural living is entirely to blame is a strawman and absurd, and was presented with no evidence that removing all rural areas would fix any problem.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        88,000 people in a town isn't rural living.
        inferiorhuman 4y ago
        https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/what-is-rural.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur... Sometimes population density is the defining concern, in other cases it is geographic isolation. Small population size typically characterizes a rural place, but how small is rural? Population thresholds used to differentiate rural and urban communities range from 2,500 up to 50,000, depending on the definition. So yeah 88,000 people could be rural if your primary factor is population density.
osigurdson 4y ago
An EV makes a great second car in Canada but the long distances and cold weather are problematic for current EV technology. Hopefully that improves relatively soon.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  LoL. Don't worry. Global warming will deal with the low temperatures.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Toronto climate, average low, January: −6.7 °C (19.9 °F) Temperature change needed for complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: between 1 and 4 °C. (That's a change by, not a change to). Effect of complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: 7.2 meter sea level rise.
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Torono isnt really typical. It is southern canada, and a bit of a heat island. Fort Mcmurray (that had to evac a few years ago) average january low: -22.5c. Places like that have almost 90c temperature swings from low to high in a given year (-50 to +35).
      - ben_w 4y ago
        The Toronto region contains about 25% of the Canadian population, which is sufficient for my point. Your attempt at nit picking, if it were valid, would actually makes it much worse: a temperature increase sufficient to turn "-22c" into "we don't need to worry about cold batteries" requires close to double the difference between today and the highest estimated average global temperature ever in the biological history of the planet, and that temperature happened before trees had evolved. For example, naïvely adding 22 C (22.5 says Wiki) to the average so that the coldest was no longer below freezing, your Fort McMurray would have a new July average high of 46.2 C, which is above the current average of Death Valley 10 months of the year and pretty close the other two.
reaperducer 4y ago
88,000 people in perhaps 50,000 vehicles all taking the ONE road out of town. That's an interesting point. We see this a couple of times a year in the United States — tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people evacuating because of an approaching hurricane. It takes hours and hours and hours to go not very far. And when you finally get someplace with an open hotel room, it's hundreds of miles away. Although I believe they are close, I'm not sure EVs are ready for that challenge yet. Especially since a gas station half-way to safety can fill up hundreds of cars faster than a dozen EVs can charge. Can more chargers solve this problem? Better chargers? Both? Something else?
- yurishimo 4y ago
  At a minimum we need some sort of fast charger that can add 50+ miles in 5 minutes. Granted, in a gas car that's a full tank usually, but let's be reasonable about what we can expect in the near-ish future. Having wireless tech that can charge that fast would be even better. Maybe get on a little conveyer belt similar to an automated carwash and by the time you exit, you have 50 more miles than before. Hell, imagine these things running parallel to a road like a pit lane on a racetrack. Move on the track for 5 minutes, then they turn around and grab cars going the opposite direction. Seems pretty inefficient and probably a logistical nightmare, but it would be cool to see it work!
  - silverspoonin 4y ago
    We already have those fast chargers. The average EV gets 3-4 miles/kwh. 50 miles would be about 15 kwh. To deliver 15kwh in 5 minutes, you'd need 180kw charging. The fastest widely available chargers currently go up to 350kw. Kia EV6/Hyundai Ioniq 5 charge from 10-80% (>200 miles) in 18 minutes (due to battery limitations).
  - minhazm 4y ago
    We can already do more than 50 miles of range in 5 minutes. For example a Tesla Model Y is rated at about 0.234 kWh/mile, round up to 0.25 kWh/mile. To get 50 miles of range you need 12.5 kWh, in order to get that in 5 minutes you need a charging speed of 150 kW. Tesla V2 superchargers already do 150 kW and V3 does 250 kW, which would only take 3 minutes to get 50 miles of range. Of course the actual charging curve depends on your battery state of charge but 50 miles in 5 minutes is very achievable in most cases, at least with Tesla. Now doing this in a portable way is the difficult part. There are a few trucks now that can do 7-10 kW output to charge cars, but that's only about 30-40 miles of range per hour, which is still quite slow. But it might be enough to top you up for 15-20 mins to get you 10-15 miles down the road to a charger. I imagine this will improve though quite a bit as more EVs are adopted. I think if we can get to 50 kW chargers from service vehicles that's good enough. On a 50 kW charger 15 minutes of charging will give you 50 miles of range on a Tesla, and on less efficient cars it will still give you at 30+ miles.
elihu 4y ago
Vehicle-to-vehicle charging is starting to be a thing, and there's always the option of using another vehicle to tow you. (You could even use regenerative braking on the towed car to recharge the battery.) Realistically, that's an extreme case and some ICE vehicles might break down too for whatever reason. In that situation if there's no other option you'd probably just ditch your car and get a ride from someone else.
adrianN 4y ago
Some kind companies can probably also set up generators to top up batteries.

epistasis 4y ago

It seems like cars are the problem here though? If people want to live in remote areas and pollute a ton, that's just fine as long as they pay to clean up the mess they make for everyone else. Direct carbon capture from the air is about $500/ton right now, which is only about $5/gallon of gas.

sandworm101 4y ago
>> If people want to live in remote areas and pollute a ton Well... if you want lumber, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and food, then you too will need people living "in remote areas".
- epistasis 4y ago
  Seems fine as long as they pay to clean up their mess, which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    The next time I see a farmer I'll pass along that it is "fine" that he continue growing the food people eat. He will appreciate having permission so to do.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      I don't think you understand what I was saying "fine" too. But people need to pay for the damage they inflict on the world. Nobody is so "special" or snowflake that they get exempted. Farmers are adults, they can be treated like any other adult in our society.
      - osigurdson 4y ago
        It seems that we are redefining things such that the only way to cause "damage" to the world is via carbon emissions (humans are very good at focusing on one metric to the exclusion of all others). Is there any "damage" done in having greater numbers of the world's poor die of starvation since we've reduced agricultural output in our quest to reduce carbon emissions? Perhaps we can dabble in fertilizer reduction after we've exhausted carbon capture from coal fired electricity plants (particularly in China and the US who are the largest emitters and still use a lot of coal) or at least converted those to natural gas. Messing with agriculture, particularly right now with the current geopolitical situation is very stupid.
      - anon291 4y ago
        The cost will just be passed to you anyway.
        phinnaeus 4y ago
        > which means that their costs will be higher which they pass on.
      - elihu 4y ago
        For that to work we'd need both a carbon tax (or something equivalent) and a heavy tariff on goods that are imported from countries without such a tax. As long as both of those things can be enacted at once, I'm in favor.
      - NateEag 4y ago
        The point is that the farmer and miner become the saints doing penance on our behalf - we all benefit from the work they do, then insist that they handle all the costs of the negative externalities their work produces. Sure, I suppose that could be priced into what they charge for their products. That may be a nontrivial challenge to work out, though, and it's possible they'll no longer be able to make a sustainable product after doing so. Life is complicated and easy answers are often wrong.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    There are better optimisations for emissions than chasing farmers and miners.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Such as? I'm generally anti-carbon tax because it's the solution to the problem that is obvious, simple, and wrong. But when there are no other solutions, charging for cleanup is the way to go. Farmers and miners pay for their costs. They can continue to do so and pass their costs on. Some farmers, at least in the US, we massively subsidize to a ridiculous extent in a make-work program for massive amounts of soy and corn. But this is an economic choice that is relatively recent in the history of the US, and we can decide at any moment to improve the efficiency of the economy by making externalized costs internal.
      - Panzer04 4y ago
        Why is a carbon tax wrong? It seems very similar in principle to your proposal?
        epistasis 4y ago
        I think a tax on certain sectors can work fine. Especially those sectors with no other options, and that must simply pay to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere that they put into it. However, an economy-wide tax ignores the differing amounts of technological development difficulty, access to capital, and political influence that varies so widely between sectors. So a carbon tax on electricity generation sources works ok to incentivize a switch and internalize the externalities, but it's pretty equivalent to the general ITC/PTC subsidies that have recently been passed, with the exception that they are sector specific. An economy wide carbon tax does almost nothing to incentivize decarbonization of steel or concrete, as the tech isn't there, nobody has spare money to invest in a solution, and the tax wouldn't necessarily increase the price of end products much. They need very specific industrial policy in these sectors to develop alternatives and put them into production. Finally a carbon tax creates an entirely unified political coalition, across many sectors of the economy, to oppose the tax. So setting the tax at a level that is right to incentivize change is guaranteed to be nearly impossible, because od the breadth and political strength of the opposition to it. Specific carrots and sticks for each sector are what can drive real change in each sector. If it was 1980, I'd be supporting a carbon tax. But we need to move far more quickly now to change our economic production systems than a carbon tax could ever conceivably achieve.
reaperducer 4y ago
If people want to live in remote areas This is an easily solved problem. Just stop eating. Once you stop eating, then we don't have to have farmers and their remotely-located support communities growing food for you. For bonus points, stop using computers. Electronics are made up of all kinds of metals that are mined in remote locations. So, stop using electricity at all, if you're really concerned about this. And while you're at it, give up toilet paper. It comes from trees that are waaaay out in the forest. If you stop wiping, then we don't have to truck trees to paper mills to make toilet paper for people in the city to use. Do your part.
- s5300 4y ago
  Lot of strawmans here.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    The OP suggesting rural living is entirely to blame is a strawman and absurd, and was presented with no evidence that removing all rural areas would fix any problem.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      88,000 people in a town isn't rural living.
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/what-is-rural.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur... Sometimes population density is the defining concern, in other cases it is geographic isolation. Small population size typically characterizes a rural place, but how small is rural? Population thresholds used to differentiate rural and urban communities range from 2,500 up to 50,000, depending on the definition. So yeah 88,000 people could be rural if your primary factor is population density.

osigurdson 4y ago

An EV makes a great second car in Canada but the long distances and cold weather are problematic for current EV technology. Hopefully that improves relatively soon.

sandworm101 4y ago
LoL. Don't worry. Global warming will deal with the low temperatures.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Toronto climate, average low, January: −6.7 °C (19.9 °F) Temperature change needed for complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: between 1 and 4 °C. (That's a change by, not a change to). Effect of complete loss of Greenland ice sheet: 7.2 meter sea level rise.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Torono isnt really typical. It is southern canada, and a bit of a heat island. Fort Mcmurray (that had to evac a few years ago) average january low: -22.5c. Places like that have almost 90c temperature swings from low to high in a given year (-50 to +35).
    - ben_w 4y ago
      The Toronto region contains about 25% of the Canadian population, which is sufficient for my point. Your attempt at nit picking, if it were valid, would actually makes it much worse: a temperature increase sufficient to turn "-22c" into "we don't need to worry about cold batteries" requires close to double the difference between today and the highest estimated average global temperature ever in the biological history of the planet, and that temperature happened before trees had evolved. For example, naïvely adding 22 C (22.5 says Wiki) to the average so that the coldest was no longer below freezing, your Fort McMurray would have a new July average high of 46.2 C, which is above the current average of Death Valley 10 months of the year and pretty close the other two.

reaperducer 4y ago

88,000 people in perhaps 50,000 vehicles all taking the ONE road out of town. That's an interesting point. We see this a couple of times a year in the United States — tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people evacuating because of an approaching hurricane. It takes hours and hours and hours to go not very far. And when you finally get someplace with an open hotel room, it's hundreds of miles away. Although I believe they are close, I'm not sure EVs are ready for that challenge yet. Especially since a gas station half-way to safety can fill up hundreds of cars faster than a dozen EVs can charge. Can more chargers solve this problem? Better chargers? Both? Something else?

yurishimo 4y ago
At a minimum we need some sort of fast charger that can add 50+ miles in 5 minutes. Granted, in a gas car that's a full tank usually, but let's be reasonable about what we can expect in the near-ish future. Having wireless tech that can charge that fast would be even better. Maybe get on a little conveyer belt similar to an automated carwash and by the time you exit, you have 50 more miles than before. Hell, imagine these things running parallel to a road like a pit lane on a racetrack. Move on the track for 5 minutes, then they turn around and grab cars going the opposite direction. Seems pretty inefficient and probably a logistical nightmare, but it would be cool to see it work!
- silverspoonin 4y ago
  We already have those fast chargers. The average EV gets 3-4 miles/kwh. 50 miles would be about 15 kwh. To deliver 15kwh in 5 minutes, you'd need 180kw charging. The fastest widely available chargers currently go up to 350kw. Kia EV6/Hyundai Ioniq 5 charge from 10-80% (>200 miles) in 18 minutes (due to battery limitations).
- minhazm 4y ago
  We can already do more than 50 miles of range in 5 minutes. For example a Tesla Model Y is rated at about 0.234 kWh/mile, round up to 0.25 kWh/mile. To get 50 miles of range you need 12.5 kWh, in order to get that in 5 minutes you need a charging speed of 150 kW. Tesla V2 superchargers already do 150 kW and V3 does 250 kW, which would only take 3 minutes to get 50 miles of range. Of course the actual charging curve depends on your battery state of charge but 50 miles in 5 minutes is very achievable in most cases, at least with Tesla. Now doing this in a portable way is the difficult part. There are a few trucks now that can do 7-10 kW output to charge cars, but that's only about 30-40 miles of range per hour, which is still quite slow. But it might be enough to top you up for 15-20 mins to get you 10-15 miles down the road to a charger. I imagine this will improve though quite a bit as more EVs are adopted. I think if we can get to 50 kW chargers from service vehicles that's good enough. On a 50 kW charger 15 minutes of charging will give you 50 miles of range on a Tesla, and on less efficient cars it will still give you at 30+ miles.

elihu 4y ago

Vehicle-to-vehicle charging is starting to be a thing, and there's always the option of using another vehicle to tow you. (You could even use regenerative braking on the towed car to recharge the battery.) Realistically, that's an extreme case and some ICE vehicles might break down too for whatever reason. In that situation if there's no other option you'd probably just ditch your car and get a ride from someone else.

adrianN 4y ago

Some kind companies can probably also set up generators to top up batteries.