7 ms·

Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for

Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for clean energy will lead. I am fully on team green but I think the switch happened too late. I feel like there is a future where you have a large percent of the population (at least in the US) where EVs are too expensive to afford the monthly payment/up front payment to switch but gas prices rise to a point where they can't afford to fill their tank anymore either. People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.

kitkat_new 3y ago
it's always possible to improve public transport, and it could happen fast if people would get their priorities straight; more options are car sharing and concentrating on more dense areas with walkable and cyclable infrastructure (keyword 15 minute cities). something to watch instead of read: NotJustBikes
Daishiman 3y ago
I am a complete and absolute cynic on climate policies and outcomes, but battery technology is still having ridiculous breakthroughs day by day. Ultimately if the base price of a vehicle increases the financial instruments to make them affordable in the face of regulatory disincentives for ICEs will appear.
ericmay 3y ago
Best reading recommendation would be to look at climate change projections from NOAA or similar organizations for where you live or want to live, assume those will be true within some +-, and then base your decisions off of that. There doesn't seem to be a substantial downside to getting it wrong if bad scenarios don't occur but if they do occur you'll want to have gotten it right. > People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one. If only we could possibly do something about that.... but yea, EVs on the whole are better than ICE in this context, but 1-1 replacement schemes are a very bad idea and don't really address the underlying problems we face on climate change and other problems (social division, obesity, premature death, etc.); we need to stop driving everywhere. Unfortunately subtractive solutions (which are almost always better) such as building a little bit closer together (nobody is taking your SFH away), allowing businesses to operate near homes, and building sidewalks don't sell cars, don't fill transportation department budgets and justify jobs, don't win elections, and don't increase GDP. Some big multi-million dollar project that brings "300 new manufacturing jobs" gets the headline and gets the funding, even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Right, but, to a large extent, Americans love the burbs and you are not going to be able to get them to vote for their demise, no matter how many benefits you can see .
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    I live in the burbs, and everything I need is a bicycle ride away. I currently work remotely, although that's about to change because we, like most companies, seem hellbent on making people drive in traffic and be generally less happy. During the pandemic I put maybe 4-5k miles on my vehicle. I would fill up gas once a month. Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing. We need to make living sustainable for a variety of different type of living arrangements because nothing in America is ever this clear cut and dry or uniform. You can exercise positive patterns of behavior and living/lifestyle choices where ever you are. Besides, 99.9% of human existence was the village model: clusters of independent and self-sufficient communities. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's what we've evolved with.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      It's going to be about suburbs vs rural for as long as the suggested solutions only work in urban environments. If you don't like it being that way, then suggest a solution that works for people who don't live and work in a dense environment.
      - dimitrios1 3y ago
        My entire point is the suggested solutions aren't solutions. The onus is on those suggesting to suggest something practical and that will actually work, not utopian fantasies.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      > Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing Right, the exact point I was making. That said, your suburbia apologia is a bit silly - naturalism fallacy aside, the suburban experience isn't even close to that of primordial human tribes. And it matters little if you bike to your stores, the goods you're buying at your store are not brought there on bikes, just the emissions from the concrete needed to pave over that amount of land is ridiculous, etc. etc. Unlocking suburban "sustainability" would require next generation sequestration tech or full electrification + renewables.
throwaway22032 3y ago
Public transport is impossible in most US cities. By impossible, I mean so uneconomical that it cannot happen at scale. The geography is not there. Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing. Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  > It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars. Bet you it actually wouldn't, the impact of urban sprawl is absolutely massive and continuous as compared to a one-time cost.
  - throwaway22032 3y ago
    Fair enough. I don't think it really matters to be honest, Americans are not moving into even something like my ~1500sqft terraced house en masse. You may as well ask half the country to learn Russian.
    - dublinben 3y ago
      The 60% of Millennials who don’t own a home, and the 60% of gen-Z who live with their parents would probably leap at the opportunity to own their own 1500 Sq ft row house. We don’t need to convince anyone to move into more sustainable housing, we merely need to allow it.
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        This is a large part of the problem. When we went house hunting, we wanted to live in a denser area. But we just plain couldn't afford it, so suburbs it was.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Guess people will have to move to more dense areas if they want to survive financially then.
- criddell 3y ago
  For that to happen, living in a dense urban area needs to be much less expensive than living out in the middle of nowhere. The average income in Mississippi is around $25k / year. I'm not sure what the distribution curve looks like, but I'd guess 2/3 of the population make at least $20k / year. Cities should be designed so that a person can live a good life on $20k / year in a city.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Yes, I agree. In many places, this is the case - but not in the US.
    - criddell 3y ago
      I'm trying to think of places where city living is significantly less expensive than living in more rural areas and about the only thing I can come up with are places where land is scarce and therefore expensive. For example, Hawaii.
- jdshupe 3y ago
  And how do you propose to get produce if all the farmers move away? Saying "people should move to more dense areas" creates a whole other swath of problems to fix.
maerF0x0 3y ago
IMO What we're consistently failing to see is that necessity is the mother of invention. Mankind has summoned seemingly unfathomable ingenuity and effort in response to dire need. It seems it will be Gen Alpha/Beta who will have their "ww2 moment" but in response to existential threat from Environmental and second order societal collapse. Likely changes will include mass adoption of nuclear (potentially including Fusion or Thorium based), Carbon (and other gas) sequestration, Biodomes (to deal with a toxic environment), etc. It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  What happens when we can't find a solution. In a lot of ways we're lucky b/c every major problem that has come along we more or less have found a solution to. I suspect climate change may be a little different. Not sure if you saw the movie Up but the basic plot is an asteroid is going to crash into earth. They devise a mechanism to blow it up but it doesn't work and everyone dies. Not everyone is going to die from climate change but it's very possible we don't "solve" it and life as we know it is fundamentally altered.
  - shilgapira 3y ago
    I think you meant the movie Don't Look Up.
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    > What happens when we can't find a solution. We go extinct or evolve. But that's always been true about every existential problem that humanity has faced before, including how to get food, clothe ourselves, not die in childbirth, on and on goes the list of things we've solved in the past. I'm not saying we should recklessly exacerbate every scenario but we know that distributed problems are very difficult for humanity to solve without a present crisis (as ww2 was, and unfortunately 2050 is not present enough for typical human psychology) . > life as we know it is fundamentally altered. Yes. This has happened dozens of times, at an increasing pace across human history. Agriculture, Printing press, Germ Theory/Antibiotics, birth control + feminine hygiene products, Nuclear theory, Extra terrestrial travel, the internet, "AI" ... Each of them has unlocked an order of magnitude difference in human existence I fully expect us to invent something in this case, and do not fear if we do not. Given enough dice rolls something is going to end humanity eventually.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
At the moment I don't buy the trade off for EVs. They take a lot of carbon to make since most of the chain of mining through construction is still consuming fossil fuels and buying energy from the grid is still quite carbon intensive. You can save more money and be more helpful with solar on your roof especially in the warm areas of the US. At some point hopefully the carbon cost of the vehicles will come down and they will make more sense, they just don't save enough currently compared to a Solar array which typically pays back its carbon cost in about 90 days a vehicle is more like 5 years.
dublinben 3y ago
You’re right that EVs are not enough to solve this. We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not. The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle. Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads. The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid-19-paris-france/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid...
- jdshupe 3y ago
  > We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not. I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat. This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished. [1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...
  - dublinben 3y ago
    Obviously, this isn't a one-size fits all solution. But even per your numbers, the vast majority (80%) of American's don't live in rural areas. The solutions I mentioned are the biggest bang for the buck because they are the most broadly applicable. Even for those that do live in rural communities, this isn't an intractable situation with no possibility of improving. First of all, many rural communities existed before the invention of the automobile. They began as compact towns centered around the train station. Nearly all of them have lost passenger rail access, but places like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland show that this need not be the case. Traditional community planning would allow many people to accomplish daily tasks within town without a car, even if one was used to travel outside of town. Second, fewer people should be living an hour away from their job in an urban center, and nobody should be forced to. It must be affordable and convenient for everyone to live close enough to their job so as to enable them to easily get there without a car, but this is not a problem that can be solved overnight. Third, we must invest in an effort to install fiber optic internet access in these communities, in a 21st century repeat of the Rural Electrification program of the 20th century. Remote work is a vital lifeline to stave off the steady decline of population in rural areas. Rural communities face several existential threats, climate change is just one of them. Hopefully there can be some synergy among solutions that will make these communities more resilient in every dimension, not just climate.
kelseyfrog 3y ago
I'll give a gaming rec that's tied to a book. https://play.half.earth/ https://play.half.earth/ The discussion here mirrors many of the themes in the game, and presumably the book.
glitcher 3y ago
The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence M. Krauss https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-climate-change https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-c... Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.
- jdshupe 3y ago
  Like you said, not exactly what I was looking for but still a great read regardless. Thank you!
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Combustion engines are an inferior tech, so they'll get replaced everywhere they can be. I also think we could have been a decade ahead on this transition, if not more, but I think you'll still also be suprised at how quickly EVs totally replace ICE cars, even if you live in some poorly run area of the globe. EVs already have lower TCO and leasing companies are keen to loan you the upfront difference and let you pay it back month by month instead of spending it on gas and use the more reliable EV as collateral, reducing financing risk and cost. They'll continue to do that as the upfront price drops below ICE too. It would be nice if the US moved to a healthier, more walkable lifestyle, but if they do insist on continuing that form of slow suicide, it'll only make the transition faster. EVs make more monetary sense the longer you drive, due to lower fuel costs.
einpoklum 3y ago
Another "slogan", Use a bicycle. Yes, it's: * Not possible on non-level terrain (although e-bikes are sometimes an option). * Potentially dangerous in some places because of traffic. * Some places will not be accessible by bike due to various physical obstacles * Requires some level of physical health (although you don't have to be fit to ride a bike) but still, it's a decent solution for many of those towns without a public transport system. And if you can get your municipal authorities to support it, you can address the second and third points above.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
With China building 7 new coal plants everyday and cruise ships emitting more than all ICE cars combined I think the answer is either fusion or we just plant more and more trees.
- jcmoscon 3y ago
  We should plant more trees for sure! Not because of carbon, but because of covering the soil. Check back to garden of eden documentary. Covering the soil is the solution to end hungry! Why? Watch the documentary.
aaronbrethorst 3y ago
David Roberts, formerly of Vox and now independent, has been a great resource for years. You can find his archive at these two links: https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david And he now podcasts at the site https://www.volts.wtf https://www.volts.wtf
slothtrop 3y ago
Vaclav Smil - How the World Really Works, and Numbers Don't Lie.

kitkat_new 3y ago

it's always possible to improve public transport, and it could happen fast if people would get their priorities straight; more options are car sharing and concentrating on more dense areas with walkable and cyclable infrastructure (keyword 15 minute cities). something to watch instead of read: NotJustBikes

Daishiman 3y ago

I am a complete and absolute cynic on climate policies and outcomes, but battery technology is still having ridiculous breakthroughs day by day. Ultimately if the base price of a vehicle increases the financial instruments to make them affordable in the face of regulatory disincentives for ICEs will appear.

ericmay 3y ago

Best reading recommendation would be to look at climate change projections from NOAA or similar organizations for where you live or want to live, assume those will be true within some +-, and then base your decisions off of that. There doesn't seem to be a substantial downside to getting it wrong if bad scenarios don't occur but if they do occur you'll want to have gotten it right. > People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one. If only we could possibly do something about that.... but yea, EVs on the whole are better than ICE in this context, but 1-1 replacement schemes are a very bad idea and don't really address the underlying problems we face on climate change and other problems (social division, obesity, premature death, etc.); we need to stop driving everywhere. Unfortunately subtractive solutions (which are almost always better) such as building a little bit closer together (nobody is taking your SFH away), allowing businesses to operate near homes, and building sidewalks don't sell cars, don't fill transportation department budgets and justify jobs, don't win elections, and don't increase GDP. Some big multi-million dollar project that brings "300 new manufacturing jobs" gets the headline and gets the funding, even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.

whimsicalism 3y ago
Right, but, to a large extent, Americans love the burbs and you are not going to be able to get them to vote for their demise, no matter how many benefits you can see .
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  I live in the burbs, and everything I need is a bicycle ride away. I currently work remotely, although that's about to change because we, like most companies, seem hellbent on making people drive in traffic and be generally less happy. During the pandemic I put maybe 4-5k miles on my vehicle. I would fill up gas once a month. Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing. We need to make living sustainable for a variety of different type of living arrangements because nothing in America is ever this clear cut and dry or uniform. You can exercise positive patterns of behavior and living/lifestyle choices where ever you are. Besides, 99.9% of human existence was the village model: clusters of independent and self-sufficient communities. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's what we've evolved with.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    It's going to be about suburbs vs rural for as long as the suggested solutions only work in urban environments. If you don't like it being that way, then suggest a solution that works for people who don't live and work in a dense environment.
    - dimitrios1 3y ago
      My entire point is the suggested solutions aren't solutions. The onus is on those suggesting to suggest something practical and that will actually work, not utopian fantasies.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    > Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing Right, the exact point I was making. That said, your suburbia apologia is a bit silly - naturalism fallacy aside, the suburban experience isn't even close to that of primordial human tribes. And it matters little if you bike to your stores, the goods you're buying at your store are not brought there on bikes, just the emissions from the concrete needed to pave over that amount of land is ridiculous, etc. etc. Unlocking suburban "sustainability" would require next generation sequestration tech or full electrification + renewables.

throwaway22032 3y ago

Public transport is impossible in most US cities. By impossible, I mean so uneconomical that it cannot happen at scale. The geography is not there. Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing. Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.

whimsicalism 3y ago
> It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars. Bet you it actually wouldn't, the impact of urban sprawl is absolutely massive and continuous as compared to a one-time cost.
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  Fair enough. I don't think it really matters to be honest, Americans are not moving into even something like my ~1500sqft terraced house en masse. You may as well ask half the country to learn Russian.
  - dublinben 3y ago
    The 60% of Millennials who don’t own a home, and the 60% of gen-Z who live with their parents would probably leap at the opportunity to own their own 1500 Sq ft row house. We don’t need to convince anyone to move into more sustainable housing, we merely need to allow it.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      This is a large part of the problem. When we went house hunting, we wanted to live in a denser area. But we just plain couldn't afford it, so suburbs it was.

whimsicalism 3y ago

Guess people will have to move to more dense areas if they want to survive financially then.

criddell 3y ago
For that to happen, living in a dense urban area needs to be much less expensive than living out in the middle of nowhere. The average income in Mississippi is around $25k / year. I'm not sure what the distribution curve looks like, but I'd guess 2/3 of the population make at least $20k / year. Cities should be designed so that a person can live a good life on $20k / year in a city.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. In many places, this is the case - but not in the US.
  - criddell 3y ago
    I'm trying to think of places where city living is significantly less expensive than living in more rural areas and about the only thing I can come up with are places where land is scarce and therefore expensive. For example, Hawaii.
jdshupe 3y ago
And how do you propose to get produce if all the farmers move away? Saying "people should move to more dense areas" creates a whole other swath of problems to fix.

maerF0x0 3y ago

IMO What we're consistently failing to see is that necessity is the mother of invention. Mankind has summoned seemingly unfathomable ingenuity and effort in response to dire need. It seems it will be Gen Alpha/Beta who will have their "ww2 moment" but in response to existential threat from Environmental and second order societal collapse. Likely changes will include mass adoption of nuclear (potentially including Fusion or Thorium based), Carbon (and other gas) sequestration, Biodomes (to deal with a toxic environment), etc. It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.

mdgrech23 3y ago
What happens when we can't find a solution. In a lot of ways we're lucky b/c every major problem that has come along we more or less have found a solution to. I suspect climate change may be a little different. Not sure if you saw the movie Up but the basic plot is an asteroid is going to crash into earth. They devise a mechanism to blow it up but it doesn't work and everyone dies. Not everyone is going to die from climate change but it's very possible we don't "solve" it and life as we know it is fundamentally altered.
- shilgapira 3y ago
  I think you meant the movie Don't Look Up.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  > What happens when we can't find a solution. We go extinct or evolve. But that's always been true about every existential problem that humanity has faced before, including how to get food, clothe ourselves, not die in childbirth, on and on goes the list of things we've solved in the past. I'm not saying we should recklessly exacerbate every scenario but we know that distributed problems are very difficult for humanity to solve without a present crisis (as ww2 was, and unfortunately 2050 is not present enough for typical human psychology) . > life as we know it is fundamentally altered. Yes. This has happened dozens of times, at an increasing pace across human history. Agriculture, Printing press, Germ Theory/Antibiotics, birth control + feminine hygiene products, Nuclear theory, Extra terrestrial travel, the internet, "AI" ... Each of them has unlocked an order of magnitude difference in human existence I fully expect us to invent something in this case, and do not fear if we do not. Given enough dice rolls something is going to end humanity eventually.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

At the moment I don't buy the trade off for EVs. They take a lot of carbon to make since most of the chain of mining through construction is still consuming fossil fuels and buying energy from the grid is still quite carbon intensive. You can save more money and be more helpful with solar on your roof especially in the warm areas of the US. At some point hopefully the carbon cost of the vehicles will come down and they will make more sense, they just don't save enough currently compared to a Solar array which typically pays back its carbon cost in about 90 days a vehicle is more like 5 years.

dublinben 3y ago

You’re right that EVs are not enough to solve this. We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not. The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle. Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads. The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid-19-paris-france/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid...

jdshupe 3y ago
> We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not. I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat. This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished. [1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...
- dublinben 3y ago
  Obviously, this isn't a one-size fits all solution. But even per your numbers, the vast majority (80%) of American's don't live in rural areas. The solutions I mentioned are the biggest bang for the buck because they are the most broadly applicable. Even for those that do live in rural communities, this isn't an intractable situation with no possibility of improving. First of all, many rural communities existed before the invention of the automobile. They began as compact towns centered around the train station. Nearly all of them have lost passenger rail access, but places like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland show that this need not be the case. Traditional community planning would allow many people to accomplish daily tasks within town without a car, even if one was used to travel outside of town. Second, fewer people should be living an hour away from their job in an urban center, and nobody should be forced to. It must be affordable and convenient for everyone to live close enough to their job so as to enable them to easily get there without a car, but this is not a problem that can be solved overnight. Third, we must invest in an effort to install fiber optic internet access in these communities, in a 21st century repeat of the Rural Electrification program of the 20th century. Remote work is a vital lifeline to stave off the steady decline of population in rural areas. Rural communities face several existential threats, climate change is just one of them. Hopefully there can be some synergy among solutions that will make these communities more resilient in every dimension, not just climate.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

I'll give a gaming rec that's tied to a book. https://play.half.earth/ https://play.half.earth/ The discussion here mirrors many of the themes in the game, and presumably the book.

glitcher 3y ago

The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence M. Krauss https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-climate-change https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-c... Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.

jdshupe 3y ago
Like you said, not exactly what I was looking for but still a great read regardless. Thank you!

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Combustion engines are an inferior tech, so they'll get replaced everywhere they can be. I also think we could have been a decade ahead on this transition, if not more, but I think you'll still also be suprised at how quickly EVs totally replace ICE cars, even if you live in some poorly run area of the globe. EVs already have lower TCO and leasing companies are keen to loan you the upfront difference and let you pay it back month by month instead of spending it on gas and use the more reliable EV as collateral, reducing financing risk and cost. They'll continue to do that as the upfront price drops below ICE too. It would be nice if the US moved to a healthier, more walkable lifestyle, but if they do insist on continuing that form of slow suicide, it'll only make the transition faster. EVs make more monetary sense the longer you drive, due to lower fuel costs.

einpoklum 3y ago

Another "slogan", Use a bicycle. Yes, it's: * Not possible on non-level terrain (although e-bikes are sometimes an option). * Potentially dangerous in some places because of traffic. * Some places will not be accessible by bike due to various physical obstacles * Requires some level of physical health (although you don't have to be fit to ride a bike) but still, it's a decent solution for many of those towns without a public transport system. And if you can get your municipal authorities to support it, you can address the second and third points above.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

With China building 7 new coal plants everyday and cruise ships emitting more than all ICE cars combined I think the answer is either fusion or we just plant more and more trees.

jcmoscon 3y ago
We should plant more trees for sure! Not because of carbon, but because of covering the soil. Check back to garden of eden documentary. Covering the soil is the solution to end hungry! Why? Watch the documentary.

aaronbrethorst 3y ago

David Roberts, formerly of Vox and now independent, has been a great resource for years. You can find his archive at these two links: https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david And he now podcasts at the site https://www.volts.wtf https://www.volts.wtf

slothtrop 3y ago

Vaclav Smil - How the World Really Works, and Numbers Don't Lie.