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Comrade! I have figured out renewable energy. Let me tell you of my top down plan to solve it! Wait in this line. No that's the bread line, wait in the other li
by stevenfoster 4y ago
Comrade! I have figured out renewable energy. Let me tell you of my top down plan to solve it! Wait in this line. No that's the bread line, wait in the other line for your energy then get back in the bread line.
With that out of the way, the glaring miss here is that gasoline or coal burned at utility scale is quite efficient and while far from perfect, that is a different calculation than, wow somehow like there are hundreds of millions of gas cars everywhere. That's pretty inefficient.
Also with all this renewable energy, how are you going to light up the forges that need massive amounts of energy to make the materials for wind capture? Will lithium, iron, and phosphate mining really do less harm at scale than fracking and mining for coal? If shipping and logistics use more energy than individual consumers, and consumers buy their home energy from their utility companies, why are you trying to hard sell individuals if you actually have a solid value proposition for utilities and shipping/logistic companies? They have the assets to leverage for loans and investments to deploy new means of energy at scale. Why do you need to preach to individuals that their gas car is evil, when your economies of scale at the corporate level should make a consumer option more affordable and accessible?
- bryanlarsen 4y agoA typical EV uses about 30kg of lithium. A typical gas car will use 50 tons of gasoline. And that lithium is recyclable while the gasoline isn't. Even if that lithium mining and processing is dirty, is it >1000x dirtier?
- tenpies 4y agoAt that point, the minute we start taxing scope 3 emissions, every single EV company goes bankrupt. Surprise: mining runs on diesel and natural gas. Now add in all those emissions to those 30 kg of lithium (and let's not even count all the other extremely environmentally hostile elements needed). Now we ship them accross the world, usually to China, and then from China to somewhere else. Then we burn coal (Germany today) to build that shiny "green" Tesla. If we were serious about this green thing we would be focused on urban planning, public transit, and retrofitting existing vehicles to be greener. The greenest car is a car you don't have to manufacture.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoIf you tax scope 3 emissions, all industrial processes would be approximately equally affected. So let's say you double the price of lithium, adding a few hundred dollars to the price of an EV, and you double the price of gasoline, adding tens of thousands to the price of operating a gas car. Also keep in mind that both lithium and gasoline are currently supply constrained rather than demand constrained. The price of lithium is currently 8x the cost of production, and the price of oil is currently about 2x the cost of production. Lithium producers will still be quite profitable at current prices if costs double, but oil producers would not be. Taxing scope 3 emissions would help public transit even more than it would help EV's.