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I’m not so convinced about the efficacy of transportation decarbonization, at least at the personal EV cars level. It kind of feels the same as when governments

I’m not so convinced about the efficacy of transportation decarbonization, at least at the personal EV cars level. It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming. Looking at [1], COVID when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. [2] indicates that cars and buses together contribute ~7% to global emissions. Aviation and shipping individually are bigger CO2 emitters than the total amount used by personal vehicles. Also these reports are hilarious (is that the right word?) to read. They use phase out to mean “no co2 emissions from this sector” while politicians say phase out to mean “no new sales/construction of co2 emitters in this sector”. Completely phasing it out will take much much longer. It’s good for us to do the work and cars are a meaningful contributor, but the biggest impact would actually be shipping + aviation + trucking. Unfortunately those are also the hardest problems and the ones EVs won’t touch any time soon (maybe trucking but even then I think we’re stuck with diesel for quite a while). Shipping probably needs nuclear power and aviation needs some kind of zero emission fuel (hydrogen probably won’t cut it). Heck we haven’t even removed lead from aviation fuel and that doesn’t even require an engine change. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport

mnw21cam 3y ago
> ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal... Seriously? The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Well the generous argument is that the average person isn’t eating out so much, but yeah welcome to Californian water culture. It’s brain dead because of entrenched farming and industry interests. They also tell you to cut back on personal usage. But that amounts to 10% compared with agriculture’s 40% (used to grow economic crops like alfalfa which we send to China, not food crops) and 50% is lost to the environment. > Initial water savings came mainly from more efficient indoor plumbing and fixtures; more recent efforts have also focused on reducing outdoor use, which accounts for nearly half of all urban use. https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming. Except that it isn't: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon-dioxide-emissions-breakdown/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon... > when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. Because the reduction was a percent of half of less than a third of CO2 emissions. People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck. > I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. Why not? Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. Add a third rail or electric gantry and you don't need the generator, and put some batteries in the locomotive and you can get by partial coverage. Container ships are predominantly cargo by weight and have some significant leeway in terms of generation methods with a poor energy density -- or you can go the opposite way and use a nuclear reactor as you say. The hard one is aviation, but it's only ~2% of total CO2 emissions and the worst case scenario is biofuels, which would be more expensive but is a known working technology in the absence of any lower cost alternative. The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option. But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  > Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. I intentionally omitted rail as it’s already extremely efficient in terms of co2 per kg shipped compared with other forms of transportation. As for trucks, no, electrifying them is harder for all sorts of reasons. A big one is range and how big a battery would need to sit for them. If you’re thinking commuter trucks and local delivery vans sure. But diesel trucks are really hard to electrify. Evidence: people have been trying to do this for a while and there’s no electric semis on the road. > People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck. That argument feels flat - work commuting makes up the vast majority of miles that people use their cars for. As for aviation, its global warming effect is actually larger because of complicated effects. Unclear what biofuels will do. > The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option. If you spend the money to build nuclear for winter, it makes a lot more sense to run it in the summer too. If anything, solar and wind make more sense as technologies to power recapture with nuclear satisfying our day to day energy demands. > But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems. Never said you do but it is worth discussing when talking about resource expenditure - we should be allocating resources to solving the most impactful changes, not the easiest ones. I’ll note that solar advocates conveniently overlook how much our grid demands will scale up with electrification of transportation - it will rapidly out grow our renewable efforts since we’re not regularly building nuclear power plants meaning fossil fuels will take up the slack.

mnw21cam 3y ago

> ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal... Seriously? The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.

vlovich123 3y ago
Well the generous argument is that the average person isn’t eating out so much, but yeah welcome to Californian water culture. It’s brain dead because of entrenched farming and industry interests. They also tell you to cut back on personal usage. But that amounts to 10% compared with agriculture’s 40% (used to grow economic crops like alfalfa which we send to China, not food crops) and 50% is lost to the environment. > Initial water savings came mainly from more efficient indoor plumbing and fixtures; more recent efforts have also focused on reducing outdoor use, which accounts for nearly half of all urban use. https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming. Except that it isn't: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon-dioxide-emissions-breakdown/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon... > when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. Because the reduction was a percent of half of less than a third of CO2 emissions. People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck. > I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. Why not? Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. Add a third rail or electric gantry and you don't need the generator, and put some batteries in the locomotive and you can get by partial coverage. Container ships are predominantly cargo by weight and have some significant leeway in terms of generation methods with a poor energy density -- or you can go the opposite way and use a nuclear reactor as you say. The hard one is aviation, but it's only ~2% of total CO2 emissions and the worst case scenario is biofuels, which would be more expensive but is a known working technology in the absence of any lower cost alternative. The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option. But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.

vlovich123 3y ago
> Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. I intentionally omitted rail as it’s already extremely efficient in terms of co2 per kg shipped compared with other forms of transportation. As for trucks, no, electrifying them is harder for all sorts of reasons. A big one is range and how big a battery would need to sit for them. If you’re thinking commuter trucks and local delivery vans sure. But diesel trucks are really hard to electrify. Evidence: people have been trying to do this for a while and there’s no electric semis on the road. > People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck. That argument feels flat - work commuting makes up the vast majority of miles that people use their cars for. As for aviation, its global warming effect is actually larger because of complicated effects. Unclear what biofuels will do. > The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option. If you spend the money to build nuclear for winter, it makes a lot more sense to run it in the summer too. If anything, solar and wind make more sense as technologies to power recapture with nuclear satisfying our day to day energy demands. > But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems. Never said you do but it is worth discussing when talking about resource expenditure - we should be allocating resources to solving the most impactful changes, not the easiest ones. I’ll note that solar advocates conveniently overlook how much our grid demands will scale up with electrification of transportation - it will rapidly out grow our renewable efforts since we’re not regularly building nuclear power plants meaning fossil fuels will take up the slack.