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I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As

I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have. With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

picture 3y ago
Well the real answer is to reduce consumption. It can and should be done without sacrificing comfort. This is a very uphill battle against systems that are interested in distracting you by turning your attention towards fads (recycling, electrification, carbon capture) when in reality we need degrowth and permaculture. (Please read this thread a bit more, including my replies, before you tell me what I think degrowth means. I'm only using it to mean "less [economic] growth") In a bit more detail: How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate. Let's do away with golf lawns and pools for every house... Perhaps architecture can be adapted to suit the specific location instead of stamping the same stock photo "American house with garage that can fit 4 cars." Look at passive cooling and stuff. [Again, I'm talking about redefining comfort. Is a personal pool and large car and trimmed lawn really, honestly, what makes you comfortable? Or is it more a product of culture and advertising? You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything.] And honestly, we need to consoom less. Devices should not have a lifecycle of one year. You and I don't really need all these gadgets and trinkets, either. Let's stop buying random things If you think this is a distraction or that it won't work because we can't get everyone to agree: Degrowth and permaculture requires honestly no critical mass. You can choose to buy things that last longer, and use them a bit more. Learn to fix things, etc. These are all nothing but straight benefits to you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day).
- mmaunder 3y ago
  Degrowth is a lovely euphemism for the forbidden topic of having less kids. [insert “how dare you” meme]
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    That is not true in the least. A hypothetical three-genetation extended (and frankly, quite large) family of 25 in Bangladesh emits roughly the same amount of CO2 as an average American.
    - mmaunder 3y ago
      Always gets political. It’s humans. We’re doing it. No question about that. Less humans will mitigate it. No question. The conversation always goes to which humans or which political faction. Start with the fact that it’s us. It is us.
      - jonjon16 3y ago
        I usually like to answer this question(?) with a quote from Jordan Peterson (paraphrased), “lift people from poverty and they and their future kids will have more time to worry about a solution”. Personally speaking, to me “controlled childbirth” (unless you are instead suggesting we kill off some people) seems a contingent for the usage of humans as livestock.
        mmaunder 3y ago
        Reducing the birth rate below 2.2 kids per family on average results in negative population growth. We’re already seeing it in many places world wide as a result of equality and education. Simply creating awareness of the global benefits is enough. We are already facing a catastrophic global population decline mid century which is going to shock the hell out of our forever-growth economic systems. The only question is whether we’ll see a decline soon enough. Humans as livestock? Killing people? Relax dude.
    - 3y ago
jgreen10 3y ago
The amount of carbon emissions is simply far too large for sequestration efforts, natural or otherwise, to make a significant dent. In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.
- arthur2e5 3y ago
  Any hypothetical sequestration into a fuel (as in the parent parent comment) would also require a power source, so the question goes back to low-carbon power!
  - alexchamberlain 3y ago
    I think low-carbon power is fairly well understood in the form of solar and wind, and in future, maybe wave. The big problem is we can't store it or meaningfully transport it over huge distances.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Although in fairness liquid fuels are storable, so you can use intermittent solar and wind to run syngas processes. Low carbon power isn't really the hard part, grid stability and the existing vehicle fleet is. Also of course, you could theoretically build nuke plants in the middle of nowhere that are remotely operatable, then use the power to make fuel. That could avoid NIMBY related costs.
- simpleblend 3y ago
  You would think that if the world is truly on the brink of devastation, it would be at least worthy of TRYING nuclear power.
lprd 3y ago
This has been my sentiment lately. I purchased a Tesla last year (primarily to save on gas) and its been an amazing car. You raise a couple points that have been on my mind. The rare metal argument is a good one. I believe that battery disposal is sort of an issue at this time too?
- dharmab 3y ago
  The material in the batteries are valuable enough that it is profitable to recycle them. https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z
beachy 3y ago
CO2 levels have gone up by a third just since I've been alive. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching. I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  You actually do need to be a rocket scientist of a sort. You think CO2 increasing by that much is a problem because you've been told it is, probably since birth. It's not something you can observe directly with your own eyes, because it's all about small long term trends. In practice it's rocket science because: - The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions. - There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory) - Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    While the level of CO2 cannot be sensed directly, the climate change is something that I have seen with my own eyes, without anybody telling anything about it. Where I live, in Europe, since I was a little child and until now, the climate has transitioned from winters during which there were three months or more of continuous snow cover to winters during which it snows at most once or twice and the snow melts immediately, usually in a few hours. When I was a child, temperatures under minus twenty Celsius degrees were not unusual, while now there are more than ten years since the last time when I have used my winter jacket and my winter boots.
bwanab 3y ago
There's a good chance EVs aren't the best long run solution. But, right now, we don't need long run, we need immediate, short term solutions to the problem that we've got right now which is the need to keep people employed during the transition which, since people in many countries tend to live outside of transportation hubs, means keeping them in cars for the time being. EVs allow the use of non-fossil fuels to power that auto transport. But, where you're definitely right is that we need to be exploring every avenue. No one can really predict what technologies are going to work best.
- nextos 3y ago
  Pluggable hybrids (PHEVs) have never been taken seriously by politicians, here in EU, and I think it is absurd. Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy. Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.
runarberg 3y ago
Electric cars are a terrible representative of electrification. When people talk about electrification as a climate mitigation a big part of that is the significant increase in the energy efficiency of electric systems. For example a heat pump in a well insulated house will significantly decrease the energy consumption over a gas heater. Likewise delivering electricity to a saw mill will yield power with much more efficient energy use, than an on-site diesel powered machinery. Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.
- DennisP 3y ago
  If we were playing Civilization, then public transit would be the way to go. For the world we live in, expanding public transit is a slow and difficult political process, but people happily buy electric cars because they're fun.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    Your timeline doesn’t work favorable for our climate. Electric car rollout is even slower than public transit rollout. A willing city government can dedicate a lane or two in strategic arterials, build bus stops, orders busses, and hire more bus drivers in 3-5 years easy (even quicker if they—as many cities already do—have a plan in place). So far battery manufacturing facilities and raw materials required for an electric car rollout with equal impact to public transit simply don’t exist, creating the infrastructure for these facilities and expanding mining operation to meet up with the demand of batteries for all these electric cars might take 5-10 years with heavy government involvement, including subsidies to manufacturers amounting to orders of magnitude more than public transit infrastructure would need. A realistic rollout of electric cars of sufficient magnitude is north of 2035. A realistic rollout of public transit infrastructure is 2030 with benefits starting immediately.
matsemann 3y ago
EVs also don't solve the other issues with cars. Like how deadly they are, microplastics and pollution from tire/road wear, noise in residential areas, the huge waste of area, expensive upkeep of infrastructure, how they make cities less inhabitable etc etc.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > how they make cities less inhabitable Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1]. [0]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-priorities/data-expertise/migration-info-brief.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-p... [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-metro-population-towns-05172019-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-me...
  - palata 3y ago
    > at least in the US Well the US is never a good example for that, because the US notoriously completely screwed up their city planning w.r.t. cars. You need to look at examples of cities that were not built around the individual cars to check whether that's possible or not, and whether people like it better or not.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Careful: Chicago is a big city, and it's tough to characterize population loss the way you are. The neighborhood that experienced the most population loss over the last 20 years was Auburn-Gresham, which, while "walkable", is not a place a lot of Chicago residents go out of their way to walk in. One large pattern of population shifts in Chicagoland is from the formerly-redlined south and west sides to the south suburbs, or to the southern states. The parts of Chicago you'd think about when you think "walkable cities" are thriving.
jfengel 3y ago
It is much, much too late for "maybe some other process will save us". Electric card are the solution that is already working. If we had all electric cars then transportation would no longer be the biggest problem. We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial. If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.
jackmott 3y ago
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0xDEF 3y ago
>and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have. Our CO2 emissions are warming the Earth and making it unliveable for billions of people in the global south. The localized toxic pollution problems you mentioned are a secondary problem.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? Capturing CO2 and converting CO2 to fuel requires putting the energy back into the molecules somehow. That requires a ton of energy. So either way don't we need to solve electrification?
- adrian_b 3y ago
  If capturing CO2 would be done at large scale, obviously it would be done using solar energy, like the plants, or wind energy. So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.
  - alexchamberlain 3y ago
    If I'm reading the literature correctly, there are plenty of industrial processes producing streams of CO2, such as concrete manufacturer, that wouldn't even require separating the CO2 from "raw" air per se. At least the initial success of any electrolysis will probably be as a bolt on to these processes, to reduce their CO2 output IMHO.
jakewins 3y ago
There are real issues and unknowns here, you are right - but you also have to maintain perspective and scale. The rare minerals and metals we are using to drive the transition are not being combusted into the atmosphere like gasoline additives are: when EV batteries wear out the lithium is right there ready to be recycled; it’s not a consumable. Yes, EVs are heavier, yes their tires give off more particulates as a result, yea that is a problem. But EVs overall give off way, way, way fewer particulate emissions overall by replacing brake pad use with regenerative braking and by not combusting carbohydrates and pumping the residue out their tailpipes. The things you list are not mutually exclusive: Reducing car use, replacing ICEs with EVs, replacing fossil fuels with electro fuels etc is an “all of the above” choice
whats_a_quasar 3y ago
Electric cars vastly reduce the environmental impact of cars. Everyone who's run the numbers agrees on this [1][2][3]. Battery vehicles aren't that much heavier than gasoline vehicles, and the volume of metals needed to make a battery is a tiny fraction of the volume of oil needed to fuel a car across its lifecycle. Power plants are much more efficient than small engines in cars, and as the grid decarbonizes the emissions of battery electric vehicles move towards zero. Electric cars really are far better for the planet than burning gas, there isn't a catch. I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries. Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale. [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-life-cycle-greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-a-mid-size-bev-and-ice-vehicle https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... [2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122000867 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  It's not just that. Solar is already cheaper than other generation methods, except that it's intermittent. So it needs some kind of storage technology. The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.
  - 3y ago
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives Curb weight: Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs. BMW 330i: 3536 lbs. Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs. Is this supposed to be a massive difference? > With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.
- logifail 3y ago
  > Curb weight: Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs / BMW 330i: 3536 lbs / Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs. We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park! > There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park! These vehicles were chosen because they are approximately the same size as the Model 3. You can make whatever kind of vehicle in whatever size you want. There are electric bikes that weigh 40 pounds. > Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions. Raising energy costs before the existing infrastructure is replaced would be catastrophic, because replacing everything overnight is impossible and in the meantime the poor would go bankrupt and the middle class would become poor. The only sensible way to implement a carbon tax is to refund all of the money to the population. But that's also all you need to do, because then people would have a monetary incentive to avoid the tax by reducing emissions in whatever way they find most efficient.
hwillis 3y ago
> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans. For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking. > Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015. > without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated. Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that. > what impact the mines themselves will have. Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it. > should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it. > better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.
- Izkata 3y ago
  > > As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier > Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans. Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-safety-risk/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-s... https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electric-vehicles-safety-risks https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electri...
hannob 3y ago
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances The "advances" are relatively modest efficiency improvements, but they don't change fundamental realities like the laws of thermodynamics. "Unburning CO2" will require enormous amounts of energy. You may shave off a few percent of losses here and there, but the amounts are so huge, it is absurd to think that you could do that and just continue business as usual. For your example of cars it makes even less sense. You have no practical way of capturing the CO2 from cars short of taking it from the air. So you added another extremely energy intensive process.
CalRobert 3y ago
Electric cars also make it harder for places to be livable with no car, which is what we actually need. They're faster and heavier, both of which will kill more people biking and walking.
itissid 3y ago
When NYC turned manhattan's 14th street[1](a bidirectional wide traffic street) into bus only for rush hours with very strict rules for cars, car farers yelled and hollered and people warned of traffic snarl-ups up the wazoo. In reality none of that really materialized. And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people. People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you). [1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml
- gottorf 3y ago
  > And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception? How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception? What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then? > just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.
gumby 3y ago
This question has been studied extensively for decades. a simple search should provide numerous references to referred articles in journals general (nature, science) and specialized. And “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare, despite the term.
- hwillis 3y ago
  there are also no rare earths in batteries. There are rare earths in computers (the same kinds in regular cars) and in neodymium magnets. lithium is not a rare earth element.
lamontcg 3y ago
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? Being able to do that cheaply is still science-fiction. Wind and Solar are here right now.
yongjik 3y ago
> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? That's much harder than it sounds, because (unlike, say, lithium) what's important in propane is the energy stored in it in the forms of chemical bonds, not the constituent elements. Basically, the resulting C/O/H we have is just waste product. We can't "just reassemble it back to propane" because to do it we need energy, and if we have that energy, why not just use it directly? No need to insert propane as an intermediary, barring unusual situations like jet fuel. It's basically like trying to turn feces and urine back to a beef steak. Having carbon and hydrogen atoms isn't the hard part of producing beef.
- alexchamberlain 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. We have plenty of energy, in the form of untapped solar and wind, for example. The challenge is storing and distributing it, for which energy dense hydrocarbons are very effective. (Even coal is more energy dense than lithium ion batteries, and that's nothing compare to oils and its distillates). There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.
lost_tourist 3y ago
I have quit worrying about it. We have a solution: nuclear power base load + wind/solar secondary. I will vote for candidates who promote that, otherwise there is nothing I can do, I've reduced my foot print quite a bit over the years and will stick to that. Otherwise I guess we're doomed. I'm not gonna obsess over it with a doom dashboard/countdown
- palata 3y ago
  > We have a solution: nuclear power base load + wind/solar secondary. Which is not enough. We need nuclear + wind/solar + degrowth. Because those energies don't remotely replace fossil fuels. Still, that is a solution (at least that's the less bad I see). We just need to accept it.
tomaskafka 3y ago
Yes, much better solution would be massively boosting (and electrifying) public transport, but half of people will be shouting about socialism if you try to implement it.

picture 3y ago

Well the real answer is to reduce consumption. It can and should be done without sacrificing comfort. This is a very uphill battle against systems that are interested in distracting you by turning your attention towards fads (recycling, electrification, carbon capture) when in reality we need degrowth and permaculture. (Please read this thread a bit more, including my replies, before you tell me what I think degrowth means. I'm only using it to mean "less [economic] growth") In a bit more detail: How about less cars? More effective public transit is good for people and the climate. Let's do away with golf lawns and pools for every house... Perhaps architecture can be adapted to suit the specific location instead of stamping the same stock photo "American house with garage that can fit 4 cars." Look at passive cooling and stuff. [Again, I'm talking about redefining comfort. Is a personal pool and large car and trimmed lawn really, honestly, what makes you comfortable? Or is it more a product of culture and advertising? You're absolutely free to believe either way, and I don't want anyone to force you to do anything.] And honestly, we need to consoom less. Devices should not have a lifecycle of one year. You and I don't really need all these gadgets and trinkets, either. Let's stop buying random things If you think this is a distraction or that it won't work because we can't get everyone to agree: Degrowth and permaculture requires honestly no critical mass. You can choose to buy things that last longer, and use them a bit more. Learn to fix things, etc. These are all nothing but straight benefits to you (more money in your pocket, skills that can make you more valuable in the current system, more time available now that you aren't swiping short form videos all day).

mmaunder 3y ago
Degrowth is a lovely euphemism for the forbidden topic of having less kids. [insert “how dare you” meme]
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  That is not true in the least. A hypothetical three-genetation extended (and frankly, quite large) family of 25 in Bangladesh emits roughly the same amount of CO2 as an average American.
  - mmaunder 3y ago
    Always gets political. It’s humans. We’re doing it. No question about that. Less humans will mitigate it. No question. The conversation always goes to which humans or which political faction. Start with the fact that it’s us. It is us.
    - jonjon16 3y ago
      I usually like to answer this question(?) with a quote from Jordan Peterson (paraphrased), “lift people from poverty and they and their future kids will have more time to worry about a solution”. Personally speaking, to me “controlled childbirth” (unless you are instead suggesting we kill off some people) seems a contingent for the usage of humans as livestock.
      - mmaunder 3y ago
        Reducing the birth rate below 2.2 kids per family on average results in negative population growth. We’re already seeing it in many places world wide as a result of equality and education. Simply creating awareness of the global benefits is enough. We are already facing a catastrophic global population decline mid century which is going to shock the hell out of our forever-growth economic systems. The only question is whether we’ll see a decline soon enough. Humans as livestock? Killing people? Relax dude.
  - 3y ago

jgreen10 3y ago

The amount of carbon emissions is simply far too large for sequestration efforts, natural or otherwise, to make a significant dent. In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.

arthur2e5 3y ago
Any hypothetical sequestration into a fuel (as in the parent parent comment) would also require a power source, so the question goes back to low-carbon power!
- alexchamberlain 3y ago
  I think low-carbon power is fairly well understood in the form of solar and wind, and in future, maybe wave. The big problem is we can't store it or meaningfully transport it over huge distances.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Although in fairness liquid fuels are storable, so you can use intermittent solar and wind to run syngas processes. Low carbon power isn't really the hard part, grid stability and the existing vehicle fleet is. Also of course, you could theoretically build nuke plants in the middle of nowhere that are remotely operatable, then use the power to make fuel. That could avoid NIMBY related costs.
simpleblend 3y ago
You would think that if the world is truly on the brink of devastation, it would be at least worthy of TRYING nuclear power.

lprd 3y ago

This has been my sentiment lately. I purchased a Tesla last year (primarily to save on gas) and its been an amazing car. You raise a couple points that have been on my mind. The rare metal argument is a good one. I believe that battery disposal is sort of an issue at this time too?

dharmab 3y ago
The material in the batteries are valuable enough that it is profitable to recycle them. https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ?si=HfRWIIMJbDmFhQ-z

beachy 3y ago

CO2 levels have gone up by a third just since I've been alive. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that that's an enormous problem that must be solved. To be honest, with the house well and truly on fire, who cares about hypotheticals like lithium leaching. I feel the graphs on this site are underselling the problem. The scale should be "last 60 years", "last 30 years". The changes we are making to the environment are profound and speak for themselves.

nvm0n2 3y ago
You actually do need to be a rocket scientist of a sort. You think CO2 increasing by that much is a problem because you've been told it is, probably since birth. It's not something you can observe directly with your own eyes, because it's all about small long term trends. In practice it's rocket science because: - The climate is a function of a bazillion factors, many of which aren't well understood at all, and climatologists suck at programming them anyway. That's why the models are so unstable and frequently go crazy to Venus or ice-age like conditions even when simulating a theoretically stable climate with no CO2 emissions. - There is evidence the CO2 greenhouse effect may saturate logarithmically, which if so would completely change the discussion around climate (in reality it wouldn't be allowed to change, but in theory) - Nobody knows what the effect on temperature of doubling CO2 is! This is called ECS and over the decades, different teams of climatologists have estimated it yet their estimates have been drifting apart not closer together. The much vaunted consensus has actually been collapsing, with some researchers claiming ECS is a high number and others that it's a low number.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  While the level of CO2 cannot be sensed directly, the climate change is something that I have seen with my own eyes, without anybody telling anything about it. Where I live, in Europe, since I was a little child and until now, the climate has transitioned from winters during which there were three months or more of continuous snow cover to winters during which it snows at most once or twice and the snow melts immediately, usually in a few hours. When I was a child, temperatures under minus twenty Celsius degrees were not unusual, while now there are more than ten years since the last time when I have used my winter jacket and my winter boots.

bwanab 3y ago

There's a good chance EVs aren't the best long run solution. But, right now, we don't need long run, we need immediate, short term solutions to the problem that we've got right now which is the need to keep people employed during the transition which, since people in many countries tend to live outside of transportation hubs, means keeping them in cars for the time being. EVs allow the use of non-fossil fuels to power that auto transport. But, where you're definitely right is that we need to be exploring every avenue. No one can really predict what technologies are going to work best.

nextos 3y ago
Pluggable hybrids (PHEVs) have never been taken seriously by politicians, here in EU, and I think it is absurd. Most Europeans make short commutes, so these cars have a sufficient range for the vast majority of drives. They are cheaper, much lighter, and building them uses a lot less energy. Plus, existing designs and assembly lines can be easily adapted to PHEVs. And in case of long commutes, there is always a gas engine to fall back to and therefore no range anxiety.

runarberg 3y ago

Electric cars are a terrible representative of electrification. When people talk about electrification as a climate mitigation a big part of that is the significant increase in the energy efficiency of electric systems. For example a heat pump in a well insulated house will significantly decrease the energy consumption over a gas heater. Likewise delivering electricity to a saw mill will yield power with much more efficient energy use, than an on-site diesel powered machinery. Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.

DennisP 3y ago
If we were playing Civilization, then public transit would be the way to go. For the world we live in, expanding public transit is a slow and difficult political process, but people happily buy electric cars because they're fun.
- runarberg 3y ago
  Your timeline doesn’t work favorable for our climate. Electric car rollout is even slower than public transit rollout. A willing city government can dedicate a lane or two in strategic arterials, build bus stops, orders busses, and hire more bus drivers in 3-5 years easy (even quicker if they—as many cities already do—have a plan in place). So far battery manufacturing facilities and raw materials required for an electric car rollout with equal impact to public transit simply don’t exist, creating the infrastructure for these facilities and expanding mining operation to meet up with the demand of batteries for all these electric cars might take 5-10 years with heavy government involvement, including subsidies to manufacturers amounting to orders of magnitude more than public transit infrastructure would need. A realistic rollout of electric cars of sufficient magnitude is north of 2035. A realistic rollout of public transit infrastructure is 2030 with benefits starting immediately.

matsemann 3y ago

EVs also don't solve the other issues with cars. Like how deadly they are, microplastics and pollution from tire/road wear, noise in residential areas, the huge waste of area, expensive upkeep of infrastructure, how they make cities less inhabitable etc etc.

gottorf 3y ago
> how they make cities less inhabitable Everyone says they would love to live in a walkable city, but for some reason, at least in the US, the biggest gainers in population over the recent decades have been all automobile-centric cities (which are probably more accurately described as a large patchwork of suburbs). NYC would have shrunk due to out-migration to other places if it wasn't for foreign in-migration[0]. Chicago lost people 15 out of the last 20 years[1]. [0]: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-priorities/data-expertise/migration-info-brief.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/about/dcp-p... [1]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-metro-population-towns-05172019-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-chicago-me...
- palata 3y ago
  > at least in the US Well the US is never a good example for that, because the US notoriously completely screwed up their city planning w.r.t. cars. You need to look at examples of cities that were not built around the individual cars to check whether that's possible or not, and whether people like it better or not.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Careful: Chicago is a big city, and it's tough to characterize population loss the way you are. The neighborhood that experienced the most population loss over the last 20 years was Auburn-Gresham, which, while "walkable", is not a place a lot of Chicago residents go out of their way to walk in. One large pattern of population shifts in Chicagoland is from the formerly-redlined south and west sides to the south suburbs, or to the southern states. The parts of Chicago you'd think about when you think "walkable cities" are thriving.

jfengel 3y ago

It is much, much too late for "maybe some other process will save us". Electric card are the solution that is already working. If we had all electric cars then transportation would no longer be the biggest problem. We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial. If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.

jackmott 3y ago

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0xDEF 3y ago

>and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have. Our CO2 emissions are warming the Earth and making it unliveable for billions of people in the global south. The localized toxic pollution problems you mentioned are a secondary problem.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? Capturing CO2 and converting CO2 to fuel requires putting the energy back into the molecules somehow. That requires a ton of energy. So either way don't we need to solve electrification?

adrian_b 3y ago
If capturing CO2 would be done at large scale, obviously it would be done using solar energy, like the plants, or wind energy. So solar or wind energy is a prerequisite for CO2 capture, followed by the separation from air by physical or chemical means, followed by the reduction to hydrocarbons, either by direct electrolysis or by using hydrogen obtained by water electrolysis.
- alexchamberlain 3y ago
  If I'm reading the literature correctly, there are plenty of industrial processes producing streams of CO2, such as concrete manufacturer, that wouldn't even require separating the CO2 from "raw" air per se. At least the initial success of any electrolysis will probably be as a bolt on to these processes, to reduce their CO2 output IMHO.

jakewins 3y ago

There are real issues and unknowns here, you are right - but you also have to maintain perspective and scale. The rare minerals and metals we are using to drive the transition are not being combusted into the atmosphere like gasoline additives are: when EV batteries wear out the lithium is right there ready to be recycled; it’s not a consumable. Yes, EVs are heavier, yes their tires give off more particulates as a result, yea that is a problem. But EVs overall give off way, way, way fewer particulate emissions overall by replacing brake pad use with regenerative braking and by not combusting carbohydrates and pumping the residue out their tailpipes. The things you list are not mutually exclusive: Reducing car use, replacing ICEs with EVs, replacing fossil fuels with electro fuels etc is an “all of the above” choice

whats_a_quasar 3y ago

Electric cars vastly reduce the environmental impact of cars. Everyone who's run the numbers agrees on this [1][2][3]. Battery vehicles aren't that much heavier than gasoline vehicles, and the volume of metals needed to make a battery is a tiny fraction of the volume of oil needed to fuel a car across its lifecycle. Power plants are much more efficient than small engines in cars, and as the grid decarbonizes the emissions of battery electric vehicles move towards zero. Electric cars really are far better for the planet than burning gas, there isn't a catch. I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries. Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale. [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-life-cycle-greenhouse-gas-emissions-of-a-mid-size-bev-and-ice-vehicle https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l... [2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032122000867 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
It's not just that. Solar is already cheaper than other generation methods, except that it's intermittent. So it needs some kind of storage technology. The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.
- 3y ago

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives Curb weight: Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs. BMW 330i: 3536 lbs. Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs. Is this supposed to be a massive difference? > With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.

logifail 3y ago
> Curb weight: Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs / BMW 330i: 3536 lbs / Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs. We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park! > There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park! These vehicles were chosen because they are approximately the same size as the Model 3. You can make whatever kind of vehicle in whatever size you want. There are electric bikes that weigh 40 pounds. > Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions. Raising energy costs before the existing infrastructure is replaced would be catastrophic, because replacing everything overnight is impossible and in the meantime the poor would go bankrupt and the middle class would become poor. The only sensible way to implement a carbon tax is to refund all of the money to the population. But that's also all you need to do, because then people would have a monetary incentive to avoid the tax by reducing emissions in whatever way they find most efficient.

hwillis 3y ago

> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans. For SUVs it's essentially nil. The #1 factor in the weight of a car is how big a car you get. Weight is also a secondary factor to size, as drag is the biggest cost. AND weight matters less in an EV, because at low speeds where weight matters, the EV recoups energy from regenerative braking. > Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment Lithium is ~2% of the weight of a battery. It's a tiny amount of what is mined to make a car. It's also absolutely NOT a new thing- batteries were a minority use of lithium until ~2015. > without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment Absolutely, completely wrong. Lithium is present in low concentrations EVERYWHERE, just like any other salt. The lithium concentration in batteries is so low that if they were ores, it would not be economical to mine them. Economically viable hard rock lithium ore is 2-3x more concentrated. Lithium is already in your drinking water, in your dirt, and a huge amount is in the ocean. If we were dumping giant blocks of it into landfills that would be an issue, but nobody is doing that. > what impact the mines themselves will have. Lithium brine is found in very arid places like salt flats where no water has washed the lithium into the ocean. Clay and brine mining is pretty non-disruptive, as long as you replace the water and aren't dumping acids everywhere. Hard rock lithium is just like any other quarry, but we need very little of it. > should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products When you have a cycle that is 20% efficient on one side and 50% efficient on the other side, you're consuming 10x as much energy as a pure electrical solution. It's a terrible idea. The sheer amount of fossil fuels burned globally is also like, beyond comprehension. If we did this, it would be a plurality of all human effort to sustain it. > better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing lithium is not a rare metal, or a rare earth metal. There are no rare earth metals in batteries. Lithium is as common as lead. Coincidentally, gas cars use more lead than EVs use lithium. Lead is also way, way more toxic.

Izkata 3y ago
> > As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier > Often asserted, rarely backed up. A LR Model 3 weighs 4000 lbs. A Chevy Bolt weighs 3600 lbs. An AWD Camry weighs 3600, an Audi S3 weighs 3500. It's ~15% more for sedans. Because it's approaching "common knowledge", at least for people paying vague attention to the switch. Here's three articles just from this year - took me 10 seconds to find on Google: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-safety-risk/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9587791/electric-vehicle-weight-s... https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electric-vehicles-safety-risks https://www.npr.org/2023/01/11/1148483758/ntsb-heavy-electri...

hannob 3y ago

> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances The "advances" are relatively modest efficiency improvements, but they don't change fundamental realities like the laws of thermodynamics. "Unburning CO2" will require enormous amounts of energy. You may shave off a few percent of losses here and there, but the amounts are so huge, it is absurd to think that you could do that and just continue business as usual. For your example of cars it makes even less sense. You have no practical way of capturing the CO2 from cars short of taking it from the air. So you added another extremely energy intensive process.

CalRobert 3y ago

Electric cars also make it harder for places to be livable with no car, which is what we actually need. They're faster and heavier, both of which will kill more people biking and walking.

itissid 3y ago

When NYC turned manhattan's 14th street[1](a bidirectional wide traffic street) into bus only for rush hours with very strict rules for cars, car farers yelled and hollered and people warned of traffic snarl-ups up the wazoo. In reality none of that really materialized. And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people. People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you). [1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml

gottorf 3y ago
> And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Are the high-density shops and restaurants that make those places such desirable places to be going to replenish their stock on mass transit? Or does that fall into your 10% exception? How about vans for handicapped people? Do they also fall into the 10% exception? What if it's just a miserably hot day in Manhattan, and you have a crying baby in a stroller and bags full of shopping, and you just want to catch a cab ride home this one time, damn it? Nobody said you had to have a baby and go shopping. Do you get a "necessity pass" then? > just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity Just price things accordingly and let people decide what's a luxury and what's a necessity to them. Categorical distinctions don't work very well because they're full of exceptions and ways to game the system, even without getting into the ethical question of who gets to decide what's a luxury and what isn't for everyone else.

gumby 3y ago

This question has been studied extensively for decades. a simple search should provide numerous references to referred articles in journals general (nature, science) and specialized. And “rare earths” aren’t particularly rare, despite the term.

hwillis 3y ago
there are also no rare earths in batteries. There are rare earths in computers (the same kinds in regular cars) and in neodymium magnets. lithium is not a rare earth element.

lamontcg 3y ago

yongjik 3y ago

> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear? That's much harder than it sounds, because (unlike, say, lithium) what's important in propane is the energy stored in it in the forms of chemical bonds, not the constituent elements. Basically, the resulting C/O/H we have is just waste product. We can't "just reassemble it back to propane" because to do it we need energy, and if we have that energy, why not just use it directly? No need to insert propane as an intermediary, barring unusual situations like jet fuel. It's basically like trying to turn feces and urine back to a beef steak. Having carbon and hydrogen atoms isn't the hard part of producing beef.

alexchamberlain 3y ago
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. We have plenty of energy, in the form of untapped solar and wind, for example. The challenge is storing and distributing it, for which energy dense hydrocarbons are very effective. (Even coal is more energy dense than lithium ion batteries, and that's nothing compare to oils and its distillates). There was an interesting article discussed at length on HN recently about using electrolysis for synthesising propane, which along side the book The Material World has made me start questioning batteries as the storage solution of the future.

lost_tourist 3y ago

I have quit worrying about it. We have a solution: nuclear power base load + wind/solar secondary. I will vote for candidates who promote that, otherwise there is nothing I can do, I've reduced my foot print quite a bit over the years and will stick to that. Otherwise I guess we're doomed. I'm not gonna obsess over it with a doom dashboard/countdown

palata 3y ago
> We have a solution: nuclear power base load + wind/solar secondary. Which is not enough. We need nuclear + wind/solar + degrowth. Because those energies don't remotely replace fossil fuels. Still, that is a solution (at least that's the less bad I see). We just need to accept it.

tomaskafka 3y ago

Yes, much better solution would be massively boosting (and electrifying) public transport, but half of people will be shouting about socialism if you try to implement it.